Biographies of London life

Authors: Dan Hicks and Nigel Jeffries

Between Samuel Pepys writing his first diaries in 1660 and the death of Queen Victoria in 1901, London developed from a major European trading centre at the beginning of colonial expansion to a world city and a centre of Empire. The city's population exploded from around 600,000 at the turn of the 18th century to over six million by 1901. The urban fabric and population expanded and intertwined; from the old historic core centred on the City of London, it now included areas such as the West End (Covent Garden, the Strand), the East End (Spitalfields, Bethnal Green, Whitechapel), Lambeth (Brixton, Vauxhall) and Southwark (from Borough High Street to Peckham, Camberwell and Dulwich). During the 20th century the metropolis continued its growth.

Many stories have been told about the London and Londoners of the past four centuries. 19th-century authors such as Charles Dickens, Henry Mayhew and Karl Marx wrote at length about aspects of London life, while 18th-century satirists like William Hogarth poked fun at it. Contemporary writers such as Peter Ackroyd have evoked a city brimming with people and things: a city of fire, riots, bombs, and gas-lit murders in the fog. Such stories help London's past come to life in the present.

With such stories in mind, a major new Museum of London research programme, ‘Biographies of London life’, has been formed. The Museum of London has collected material from thousands of post-medieval sites. These sites have ranged from the 18th-century porcelain factory at Limehouse, to a complete late 17th- to mid 19th-century suburb to the north and west of Spitalfields market, and William Shakespeare's Rose Theatre. Numerous excavations have yielded hundreds of thousands of post-medieval artefacts (nearly 250,000 pieces of pottery, 33,000 clay tobacco pipe, and countless quantities of glass and animal bone from the last ten years alone) and environmental remains (food and plants). Artefacts range from the clay tobacco pipes smoked by members of the audience during a Shakespearean performance to the smashed windows, broken sets of china, and glass bottles discarded by the inhabitants of Victorian Spitalfields.

However, despite such quantities of rich material available for analysis, the archaeology of London's recent past remains little studied. The recently published A research framework for London archaeology 2002 (Museum of London) acknowledges this gap in our knowledge, and among its concerns are the lack of integration between groups of artefacts and the specific historical records available to help us identify the Londoners responsible for using and discarding such material.

The past year has therefore seen the Museum of London develop the ‘Biographies of London life’, a programme that examines 17th- to 20th-century Londoners through their changing material culture. This has been developed in partnership with the School of Historical and European Studies at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia, and the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Bristol.

[excerpt from 'Biographies of London Life' by Hicks, Dan and Jeffries, Nigel 2004 Museum of London Research Matters 3]

This site report is extracted from MoLAS 2004: annual review