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Immediately after the 1666 Great Fire, Christopher Wren sought to persuade King Charles II to rebuild London according to the best principles of baroque urbanism, with wide straight streets, axial symmetry, monumental endpoints, and a waterfront with open quays. The plan was quickly rejected as impracticable and Wren's creative energy went into the design of St Paul's Cathedral and more than fifty parish churches. But his scheme was memorialized by his son and grandson as a scandal of lost opportunity, a noble vision 'unhappily defeated by faction'. Widely reproduced by print-makers, it gained iconic status, influencing street improvement in eighteenth-century London, nineteenth-century public health reform, late-Victorian advocacy of municipal autonomy, and twentieth-century planning controversies including the Paternoster Square redevelopments of 1955 and 2000. The paper shows how archival research disproving the received narrative of Wren's plan opened the way for different understandings both of the planning legacy of reconstruction after the Great Fire, and of his own accomplishments as a Renaissance architect working within a mediaeval street plan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the development of educational institutions and buildings in one slice of a big city over a long timescale. The city is London and the slice Battersea, an inner suburb of mixed character and volatile fortunes. The narrative explores the shifts and interactions between state and voluntary provision, local community needs and architectural fashion. Though the specifics of the story are naturally unique to the district, it is likely to be representative of the record of other British metropolitan areas during the same years. The paper is constructed in such a way as to draw out these potentially common strands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1908, London hosted the fourth Olympic Games. A centrepiece of the Olympics, still in a nascent form after their creation in 1896, was the marathon, a foot-race of approximately 40 km. The race was run from Windsor Castle to the Olympic Stadium at Shepherd's Bush in July 1908, and quickly became famous for its controversies, such as the judges' assistance that helped Dorando Pietri over the line, and the questionable amateur status of Canadian runner Tom Longboat. This paper will concentrate on the route of the race: on how it was planned by the Polytechnic Harriers, how it was managed on the day, how it contributed to the development of 'marathon fever' after the Olympics, and what it tells us about the growing suburban landscape of Edwardian London and its hinterlands. The paper will end with a survey of the route today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The place of London in the Irish Revival is sometimes overlooked, yet, at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the city served as a place where Irish political and cultural identities were reinvigorated amongst the migrant community there and fed directly into events back home. The experience of living in London, at one remove from Ireland, appears to have reinforced a sense of belonging and nationhood for many writers, the most prominent of which was Yeats. This article examines the life and work of Winifred M. Patton, a gifted Irish writer and nationalist who lived there between 1893 and 1914. Whilst she never achieved the same reputation as some of her contemporaries, Patton, nevertheless, published widely in Irish nationalist newspapers of the time. Apart from writing poetry, short stories and essays, she was also active in political and cultural organisations such as the Gaelic League and the Irish Fireside Club helping ferment Irish nationalist aspirations at a crucial turning point in British–Irish relations. Based on new research into an archival collection of Patton's papers, this article examines the relationship between migration, gender and nationalism and the role of literature in mediations of cultural identity in the Irish diaspora. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper uses judicial records of the Sheriffs' Court of London and the royal Court of Common Pleas at Westminster to investigate whether the concept of a later medieval 'Golden Age' of female opportunity, as Caroline Barron has posited, is indicated by London's legal customs, as reflected in quantitative evidence of London women's court appearances and the types of cases in which they were litigants. It offers an introduction to economic and legal aspects of the 'Golden Age debate' and other quantitative investigations of women in later medieval courts; presents a comparative pre-plague to post-plague analysis of London women in the London Sheriffs' Court and royal Court of Common Pleas; and places trends regarding London women within a national context. It is concluded that women in London, as elsewhere in England, were less likely to act as litigants in the post-plague era, suggesting a general tightening up of patriarchal control over women's public activities that is inconsistent with a socially expressed 'Golden Age' of women in later medieval London. But, some evidence is presented that London women may nevertheless have enjoyed slightly enhanced economic opportunities in the fifteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If women in London in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries sought the perfect crime in which to participate, selecting receiving stolen goods provided excellent opportunities for profit and little chance of punishment. Low conviction rates, combined with the fact that no behaviour outside of gendered expectations was required in its commission, made dealing in stolen goods relatively easy for women in the metropolis. Although this particular offence has not been deeply analysed by historians of crime, its commission did alarm contemporaries, including members of the legal community and social commentators. This paper explores accusations against females in London for receiving, as well as the important roles that familial relationships and work played in their indictments for the crime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the mid-19th century, the migration of people into London was at its height. Studies of gross and net migration patterns from other regions demonstrate the importance of London as a goal destination, but until now the underlying structure of migration movements was difficult to access due to the volume of material involved. This paper exploits the recent indexing of the currently available censuses to identify the individual migration behaviour of young men from Devon, Norfolk and Sussex to London. Findings relating to the size and locality of source places, occupational backgrounds, kinship and to residential and occupational choice upon reaching London are presented for each county. The importance of information as a spur to migration is underlined and differing responses in terms of occupation are attributed to distance depreciation of such information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the interaction in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries of the five cloth-making trades - burellers, weavers, fullers, shearmen, and dyers - with the drapers who sold the cloth. The drapers initially sold imported cloth, and the burellers made and sold cheap Candlewick cloth. With the replacement of imported by local cloth, weavers, fullers and shearmen made cloth, much of it of high quality, which they sold to drapers. Drapers also purchased provincial cloth. In the fifteenth century, drapers turned almost exclusively to provincial cloth, some of which they exported themselves and some of which they sold to other merchants, particularly aliens. Much provincial cloth was dyed and finished in London prior to sale, so that many shearmen, dyers and fullers prospered, while the weavers declined; those continuing to weave mostly moved to the suburbs. Drapers expanded their overseas trade, selling finished cloth to southern Europe, and cloth to Antwerp, becoming the second largest company of cloth exporters after the Mercers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is concerned with 17 firework loanwords that were advertised in the London newspapers in the eighteenth century. In the preceding century, fireworks were largely restricted to warfare. In the early eighteenth century, they were fired locally for entertainment, but the practice of the public firework display really took off after the Green Park display of 1749. Firework displays then became a staple attraction in certain pleasure-gardens. The predominant expertise at the time was Italian, and Italian vocabulary filtered down to local fireworkers and into their advertisements. It is suggested that this technical vocabulary is unlikely to have been understood by many readers. It could easily have been translated, but the display-promoters chose to keep the foreign terms, presumably in order to align fireworks with other fashionable, non-essential commodities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the mid-19th century, the migration of people into London was at its height. Studies of gross and net migration patterns from other regions demonstrate the importance of London as a goal destination, but until now the underlying structure of migration movements was difficult to access due to the volume of material involved. This paper exploits the recent indexing of the currently available censuses to identify the individual migration behaviour of young men from Devon, Norfolk and Sussex to London. Findings relating to the size and locality of source places, occupational backgrounds, kinship and to residential and occupational choice upon reaching London are presented for each county. The importance of information as a spur to migration is underlined and differing responses in terms of occupation are attributed to distance depreciation of such information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses a new method to gauge eighteenth-century crime. It counts the crimes committed against metropolitan London's justices noted in newspapers and in the Old Bailey Sessions Papers, and finds crime more prevalent than current historiography acknowledges. The article contests current claims that the manner in which newspapers noted crime constructed their readers' perception of crime, making their readers believe crime was much more horrific, and the judicial system much more just, than readers would otherwise have thought they were. The article also argues that some crimes were attacks on the powerful because they were powerful. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

London's Great Stink of 1858 has been seen as the event that forced MPs to instigate large-scale sanitation improvements, which remain the basis of the city's sewer system to the present day. This paper re-examines the Great Stink by investigating attempts to mitigate stench before 1858 through architectural intervention. Parliamentary ventilation systems were initially designed to withstand surrounding miasma through the application of metabolic concepts of organization, the building being conceived as a body that was in danger of becoming poisoned by its environment. Yet construction was beset by difficulties that led to the disintegration of system ideals and the adoption of a new ventilation philosophy that was highly susceptible to external pollution: when environmental degradation reached its zenith in 1858, MPs were left unprotected. Since the ventilation systems can therefore be said to have played a part in creating the Great Stink, we argue that their history — which emphasizes a complex relationship between technoscience, the socio-political, the built environment, and nature — is crucial in understanding the event. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Published in London between 1839 and 1852 and aligned with the commercial objectives of the New Zealand Company, the New Zealand Journal included letters from emigrants. This paper studies letters written by a small cohort of rural labourers who emigrated from Ham House in Surrey to Wellington in 1841. Following Dorothy Smith, I read them as ethnographic data, interrogating them in relation to ruling-class texts including Company records, newspaper reports and correspondence between capitalists, professionals and politicians. The labourers' letters depict capital-labour (class) and colonial (race) relations in embodied form. The everyday actualities of their activities were co-ordinated by extra-local social relations of colonialism and flows of capital and labour. Their schooling in England had been designed to 'keep them in their place'. With reference to the sparse archival resources remaining from the first years of commercially-driven settlement, before there was an apparatus of state, I consider how changing material conditions in the settlement enabled and constrained learning opportunities for these labourers' children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is both (a) an exercise in historical recovery in that it details some of the events surrounding the founding of the City and Guilds of London Institute and describes the way in which the Institute set about the building and running of two of its colleges, the City and Guilds Technical College, Finsbury, and the Central Institution in South Kensington (new archival detail is added to what is already known of this history) and (b) an attempt to interpret the above material in terms of various forms of association within the City Corporation and the guilds. Collectively the City and the guilds made an effort to come to terms with a modernizing world through the means of providing scientific and technical education. The guilds wanted to remain important even though traditional apprenticeship was dying out. In joining in a new venture to provide technical education for young people it was necessary to maintain an order in which the City's presence was clear and apparent. This paper will show how such an order was achieved and, in so doing, it shows something more generally of the relationship of tradition and rhetoric to institution building. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]