London Lives, 1690 to 1800

The Digital Humanities Institute in the School of History, Philosophy & Digital Humanities is pleased to announce the launch of a substantially updated version of the London Lives website.

W.H. Pyne, Coal Heavers, The Costume of Great Britain, 1808. Trustees of the Science Museum.

About the project

London Lives 1690 to 1800 is a fully searchable edition of 240,000 digitised primary sources about eighteenth-century London, with a particular focus on plebeian Londoners, providing access to 3.35 million names. Crime, poverty and illness; apprenticeship, work and money; how people voted, lived and died; all this and more can be found in these documents. This site includes material from eight London archives, supplemented by fifteen datasets created by other projects.

Find out more about the project 

The upgrade 

This major update includes a full rebuild of the technical infrastructure,  a redesign of the site to facilitate use on mobile phones and tablets, the introduction of the macroscope, the creation of an improved browse function, revised background pages, and corrections to errors in the markup and links to the images of the original documents.

Full list of the changes

Thanks to the team

We would like to thank Jamie McLaughlin (software engineer), Sharon Howard (Data Manager), Mary Clayton (proofreader), and Nick Phipps (web designer) for their invaluable contributions to this update.  In addition, we are grateful to the University of Sheffield alumni donors who have generously supported this and other projects.