Project overview
Our research has cast the net widely in seeking out credible secondary sources and, where possible, primary sources from the time period, including those housed in The National Archives and the British Library. We were greatly assisted by the capacious research of William Van Lennep, Emmett L. Avery, and Arthur H. Scouten, informing their compendium of resources, The London Stage 1660–1800: A Calendar of Plays, Entertainments and Afterpieces Together with Casts, Box-Receipts and Contemporary Comment (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1965), and its digitisations.
We have housed our research in an ongoing database and have been collecting also selective records of wider performances from the time period, from the streets (e.g. Punch and Judy shows), to Court and other royal performance spaces (e.g. Handel’s Water Music on the royal barge on the Thames). The aim is to add these to our map in additional layers in due course.
The maps we have used are as follows:
1682: William Morgan, ‘Morgan’s Map of the Whole of London in 1682’.
1721: John Senex, ‘A New Map of London’.
1746: John Roque, ‘Map of London, Westminster, and Southwark’.
1783: Carrington Bowles, ‘New Pocket Plan of the Cities of London and Westminster with the Borough of Southwark’.
Thanks are due to the Northeastern NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks for their generous funding; to Dr Sarah Connell, Associate Director of the NULab, for her guidance and support; to Dr Oliver Ayers, Associate Professor in History at Northeastern University, London, whose Mapping Black London project was an inspiration for the present project; to Dr Molly Nebiolo for ArcGIS advice; and to the Northeastern University Digital Cities Research Network.