Locating London launches

An interesting feature on the Radio 4 Today programme today discussed a new online web project, Locating London (www.locatinglondon.org). The site's blurb describes it as a website which "allows you to search a wide body of digital resources relating to early modern and eighteenth-century London, and to map the results on to a fully GIS compliant version of John Rocque's 1746 map."

Essentially the site uses several datasets to allow you to build up a picture of what life may have been like within an area of London at a particular time. Choose a dataset and then use a series of powerful filters to control the search eg. women killed in a particular street in a particular year.

The datasets employed are:

Old Bailey
Old Bailey Proceedings

London Lives
Coroners' Records
Criminal Justice
Hospital and Guild
Poor Relief

London Lives Additional Datasets
Fire Insurance
Four Shillings in the Pound Tax
London and Westminster Directory
PCC Wills
St. Botolph Aldgate Parish Registers
Westminster Historical Database (ratebooks)
Westminster Historical Database (votes)

Centre for Metropolitan History
Hearth Tax
Plague Deaths

Museum of London Archaeology
Glass
Clay Pipes

Other
Population and Area Data

As well as Rocque's map, the more accurate Ordnance Survey 1st Edition Map of London 1863-80 has also been employed for geo-referencing purposes.

Interesting if you have a London connection, and free to access. The programme this morning also noted that the model employed could be used for other areas of Britain, though no details were given as to whether this was actually on the cards or not.

Chris