Locating London’s Past is a GIS interface that enables researchers to map and visualize textual and artefactual data relating to seventeenth and eighteenth-century London. The famous 18th century map of London, John Rocque’s 1746 map, has been cross referenced with the first Ordnance Survey map of the city, the OS map 1869-80. Users can access the geographically-referenced data sources about society in 18th century London life.
The project, first launched in 2011, was the result of a partnership between the University of Hertfordshire, the Institute of Historical Research (University of London), and the University of Sheffield. Geo-referencing of the Rocque map and index were carried out by Museum of London Archaeology (MOLA), and the search interface was created and website front end implemented by the Humanities Research Institute (now Digital Humanities Institute) (University of Sheffield). The project was made possible by a grant from the JISC e-Content Programme 2011.
Locating London’s Past produced a working GIS-enabled public web environment that allows existing electronic historical data about London to be repackaged and organised around space. The project incorporated four elements. First, a fully rasterised and GIS-enabled version of John Rocque’s 1746 map of London was created and tied to a GIS enabled version of the first reliable modern OS map (1869-80). Second, standard geo-referencing was incorporated into some 4.9 million lines of data drawn from the Old Bailey Online, London Lives, datasets created by the Centre for Metropolitan History, and MOLA’s extensive database of archaeological finds. Third, using an API methodology, the historical GIS was presented for public use and re-use both online and as downloads, within a Google Maps ‘container’ (giving access to satellite images, ‘street views’ etc), to facilitate ‘mash-ups’ with modern datasets (geological, flooding, land use, etc). This in turn creates an environment in which additional external historical datasets and GIS enabled historical maps can be added.
By bringing within a single framework archaeological evidence of pipes and shards, and historical trial records, voting lists, insurance files and taxations records, this project contributed to the ‘spatial turn’ in humanities and social science scholarship, not just by making geographical analysis possible, but by making it readily accessible.
What’s New (2024)
Funded by a generous grant from the London Topographical Society, the site has been completely rebuilt using Leaflet an open-source, JavaScript-based library for creating interactive maps. The user interface has also been redesigned using React to optimise the site for mobile devices; and the underlying GIS data sets have been indexed for use with Elasticsearch. A number of small errors in the original implementation have also been addressed.
DHI Publication
Project Team (2024)
- Prof. Tim Hitchcock
- Prof. Robert Shoemaker
- Jamie McLaughlin (Senior Software Research Engineer – The Digital Humanities Institute)
- Dr Sharon Howard
- Dr Louise Falcini
Project Team (Original)
- Dr Matthew Davies (Institute of Historical Research, University of London)
- Prof. Tim Hitchcock (University of Hertfordshire)
- Prof. Robert Shoemaker (University of Sheffield)
- Dr Sharon Howard (Project Manager – The Digital Humanities Institute)
- Jamie McLaughlin (Developer – The Digital Humanities Institute)