An interactive map of “Lost London” that gives a ‘unique and rare’ insight to the capital has been created online by the London Metropolitan Archives.
Over 100,000 images and 130 shorts films have been digitised for the project, including footage of Victorians shelling peas in Covent Garden Market and images of the construction of Tower Bridge.
Using Google Maps, the photos and videos from ‘Victorian life in the raw’ are mapped out across approximately 11,000 streets of ‘lost London’.
Free to access, the site allows visitors to search by a particular street to see how it looked hundreds of years ago, and to print their own versions of the images.
Laurence Ward, from the London Metropolitan Archives, told London Live: “It basically takes you back in terms of place – it could be the place you live, work in, places that you go to – you can see what they looked like 100 or 200 years ago.
“These wonderful, historical images give you a chance to step back and look at how things have changed around you.
“It gives you a map of lost London, if you like, because a lot of things are images [of] things that don’t exist anymore.
Laurence Ward, from the London Metropolitan Archives, told London Live:
“They just take you back to a totally different world – it’s Victorian life in the raw.
“We’re publishing those for the first time on the site – we’re also publishing lots of film clips in London.
“The photographs, in particular, are really important because at the end of the 19th century, they show you all these things like massive engineering projects – like the construction of Tower Bridge.
“These photographs are quite unique and [give] a rare view of how these things were built – you can see photographs of people with big sledge hammers and it’s quite a surprising view of the London we know very well coming into being.”
You can start your search here. To maximize your search, read the brief information about Using the London Picture Map under the main map.
If you don’t find what you are looking for on the map, try the Advanced Search. The Search Tips are also useful.
Source: Gail Dever, Genealogy a la carte