In a new article, ‘The geography of Old Bailey crime prosecutions, 1720–1820’, published in Social History this month, we used the recently updated website, Locating London’s Past, to explore the impact of changes in policing and justice on patterns of prosecutions in eighteenth-century London.  In it, we use the distribution of crime prosecutions mapped against innovations in detective policing and access to magistrates over the century prior to the foundation of the Metropolitan Police to illuminate how these changes impacted the lives of eighteenth-century Londoners. Along the way, we also sought to demonstrate some of the possibilities of using this kind of mapping resource to research the social, economic, political and cultural history of Europe’s first million-person city. From the distribution of wealth and poverty, to patterns of voting in Westminster elections, to archaeological artefacts, to street music; to an almost unlimited range of social historical topics, Locating London’s Past makes new types of research possible.

The article and the website are built on John Rocque’s remarkable 1746 map of London—a comprehensive view of the metropolis, including not just its streets and alleys but many individual buildings, as well as illustrative ships and individuals.

Detail from John Rocque’s 1746 map of London

Digitised to the highest standards, geo-rectified to make it GIS compatible, and then indexed with the shapes of the city’s 173 parishes, 98 wards, and 5,898 individual streets and buildings, the site turns the map into an interactive environment allowing you to explore location evidence in eighteen individual datasets and to generate per-capita statistics based on detailed parish population estimates for the 1690s, 1740s, and early 1800s. Among those datasets is the Old Bailey Proceedings, containing tens of thousands of accounts of trials for serious crime from London’s central criminal court, marked up to identify geographical locations as well as types of crime and other key aspects of the trials.

Our starting point was this map.  It shows the distribution of crime locations displayed as 110 square metre tiles, allowing us to illustrate where in London per capita prosecutions were highest (the darker shades of red).  It shows that between 1720 and 1750 prosecutions were concentrated in the West End, and to a lesser extent the East End, with the City of London and north of City characterised by low prosecution rates (locations south of the Thames are not included as they fell outside the jurisdiction of the Old Bailey). But of course, prosecution rates have a complex – possibly non-existent – relationship to the underlying level of crime.

To test the forces driving these prosecutions, the first thing we did was to explore the distribution of murder; a crime historians generally agree was routinely prosecuted, given universal condemnation of the crime, and the difficulty of hiding a body or a missing person.  This map shows that, like crime overall, murders were concentrated in the West End in the first half of the eighteenth century. Murders involving swords, in particular, were concentrated along the streets where gentlemen were known to socialise, and occasionally fall out over disputes of honour. At first glance the geographies of crime and prosecutions seemed to align. But we then looked at the most common crime prosecuted at the Old Bailey: theft, and a different picture began to emerge.

We expected that most thefts resulted from economic hardship, and that this sort of offence would map on to poverty, with concentrations in the East End. But exploring the data suggested something quite different. Using the Hearth Tax returns from the 1660s to map the number of hearths (fireplaces) per household, we mapped theft against this measure of wealth. The darker red tiles reflect areas where the average number of hearths per household was high, while lighter shades reflect low numbers of hearths, and thus higher levels of poverty. The blue tiles indicate relative levels of theft. The mismatch between the two is stark, with the dark blue concentrations once again in the West End, in the same areas where one finds high numbers of hearths, while the East End had low levels of both theft and hearths. The apparent contradiction was further complicated by the fact that the City of London had high levels of hearths, but recorded little crime.  In other words, neither wealth nor poverty were consistently driving prosecution rates. For us, the question then became what drove the increasing number of prosecutions that ended up at the Old Bailey? And the hypothesis we chose to test was whether policing and regular access to a magistrate made prosecutions easier. In other words, were changing administrative and policing structures of the capital driving changes in the prosecution of crime?

In the article, we conclude that while the reform of the night watch in the 1730s did not make much difference, the rise of ‘rotation offices’, giving regular access to a magistrate, had a significant impact. More than this, we found that proactive policing, first by the Bow Street Runners and later by the constables associated with the Thames Police, also drove up prosecutions in some areas. By mapping the relationship between prosecutions and policing, we were able to approach a long-standing conundrum in eighteenth-century criminal justice history from a new perspective and make a significant contribution. But as importantly, we believe this work shows how dozens of different questions in social, economic, political and cultural history might be approached in new ways via Locating London’s Past.

Economic, Political and Cultural Data 

Owing to the rich qualitative detail included in witness statements in the trials, the Old Bailey Proceedings can be used to map many other aspects of eighteenth-century London life.

Old Bailey Trial Accounts which include words beginning with ‘Ballad’

For example, one can locate all the trials which include specific keywords or phrases, in this case all words beginning with ‘ballad’. There are 56 results, of which 36 can be mapped. This shows a concentration of ballad singing and selling on the western border of the City of London, near Covent Garden. This may have been the part of the metropolis where street life was most vibrant. By clicking on the results, you can view the relevant trial texts.  For example, in the trial of Henry Ash for robbery in 1783, Ash testified that he was walking along Fish Street Hill when he encountered an ‘old gentlewoman … in liquor’ and ‘in came a couple of ballad singers, and she bid them sing a song, and she gave them some drams’. The same mapping exercise could be carried out for any text string, whether ‘sheep’ or ‘carriage’, ‘wig’ or ‘pantaloon’.

Numerous other research topics can be investigated using the other databases in Locating London’s Past. We have already mentioned our use of the Hearth Tax Returns to map wealth and poverty. But one can also map data from the Four Shillings in the Pound Tax (1689-97), the Westminster Ratebooks (1749-1820), and a database of Fire Insurance Registers (1777-86) to explore alternative measures of wealth.

This map displays the average insured value of buildings (both commercial and residential) and shows that wealthy households were more widespread across the metropolis than the Hearth Tax data suggests, but also more unevenly distributed.

Or using the Westminster Historical Database, one can map patterns of voting in Westminster. At a time when votes were publicly recorded, we know the names, addresses, and occupations of voters along with their votes and can associate each one with the rateable value of the house they lived in.

Voters in Westminster, May 1784: Charles James Fox and Samuel Hood (blue) and Cecil Wray (green), with Average Rental Values (red)

In this map of the May 1784 General Election, we can compare the distribution of votes for the winners, Charles James Fox and Viscount Samuel Hood, in blue (Westminster elected two MPs), with those of the loser, Sir Cecil Wray, in green. We have also included, in red shading, the average rental values for each parish from the Westminster Ratebooks. Wray’s supporters were disproportionately recorded in the poorer south of Westminster, in the parish of St Margaret’s Westminster, while the victors’ votes were more frequent in the more prosperous north.

Archaeological Finds of Cups or Wine Glasses (green) and Urinals(yellow)

The site also includes two databases of archaeological finds from Museum of London Archaeology (MOLA). These allow one to map the locations of specific types of glassware or clay pipes found during excavations. These intriguing patterns can be difficult to explain.  While it is understandable that more cups or wine glasses were found in the City and Westminster than in the East End, the concentration of clear glass ‘urinals’ (for examining medical specimens) in the City remains a mystery.

Ultimately, exploring datasets using Locating London’s Past can raise more questions than it answers, but we believe mapping this historical data will lead to new and important insights into London life in the eighteenth century.

Tim Hitchcock is Emeritus Professor of Digital History at the University of Sussex.  Bob Shoemaker is Emeritus Professor of British History at the University of Sheffield.  They are co-directors of the Old Bailey Proceedings Online, Locating London’s Past, London Lives, and related digital projects.

Yugoslavia’s post‑war labour migration has long been recognised as a defining feature of the country’s development, but its gendered dimensions remain insufficiently examined. This blog post asks whether the Yugoslav state’s management of labour migration stood in striking contrast to its domestic policies of gender equality and women’s emancipation. It reflects on whether women in Yugoslavia experienced their most equal treatment within the institutionalised management of labour migration to the West. Continue reading →

In the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, thousands of minors with troublesome behaviour were sent to reform schools. Often, they spent months or even years inside the walls of disciplinary institutions. Did their young age influence how minors experienced their confinement, compared to adult detainees? This blog post discusses the different meanings of time for juvenile delinquents, using case files from Belgian state reform schools between 1900 and 1960. Continue reading →

Sailortowns could be found across the globe during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These port district neighbourhoods were often characterized by entertainment venues, lodging houses and brothels, where temporary visitors such as seafarers and residents met. However, the vibrant and transient culture of sailortowns symbolised a lifestyle that middle-class observers deemed chaotic and threatening to societal order. In our recent article in Social History 50:4, ‘Port communities on both sides of the Atlantic: neighbourhood life and public festivities in the sailortowns of Antwerp and Buenos Aires, c. 1880–1930’, we challenge this one-dimensional view. By adopting a comparative approach to two port districts with some of the most notorious reputations worldwide, we show that although sailortowns could indeed be dangerous and rowdy places, they equally fostered urban communities defined by civic life and mutual aid, while also highlighting the distinctive features of each district. Continue reading →

Historian and poet John Seed (1950-2025) played a vital role in the development of Social History, joining the Editorial Board in 1982 and serving as Reviews Editor (1982-94) and as an Associate Editor (2010-13) following the death of his friend Keith Nield (founding editor with Janet Blackman). John was also a regular contributor to Social History as an author over many years – on religious dissenters and liberal ideology and, through his collaborations with Keith Nield, on the continued salience of Marxism for the practice of a politically engaged social history.

In this reflection, the first of two tributes, historian Simon Gunn reflects on John’s contributions to the journal and to social history more broadly. You can read the tributes together with some of John’s poetry in Social History 50, 4. Continue reading →

I would like to respond briefly to Stefan Kirmse’s observations about “revisionism” among historians who wrote about the Soviet Union from the 1970s onward. I found myself in agreement with much of what he wrote but, as someone whose work has been characterized as “revisionist” and who has commented from time to time on these historiographic debates (most recently, in the Introduction and chapter one of Reflections on Stalinism, 2024), I am moved to add a few comments.

J. Arch Getty, 1950-2025

First, to the extent that the term “revisionist” has any utility – and I agree with Kirmse that it has been overloaded with largely abusive allusions – it is to denote the contributions of those who, writing within the framework of political history, revised the master narrative of totalitarian control of society. The arch-revisionist, in my view, was the late J. Arch Getty. Sheila Fitzpatrick, Donald Filtzer, Wendy Goldman, myself and others are better understood as social historians. We did not necessarily analyze Soviet history from the bottom up, but we did not restrict ourselves to top-down analysis. Eventually, we engaged in many different points of entry – from the side, in the middle, regionally, sectorally, and so forth.

Second, the heyday of social historical analysis in our field was somewhat foreshortened by the emergence of the subjectivity school associated with Jochen Hellbeck’s Revolution on My Mind (2006). Hellbeck challenged social history’s animus and conceptual frameworks by focusing not on collective social actors but individuals’ sense of “self” and their relationship to Soviet modernity.

Third and finally, in recent decades, many self-identified social historians have absorbed and been engaged in applying a variety of different perspectives – from subjectivity to gender, ecology, migration, borderland studies, and political economy – while also expanding the chronological scope of their work. These developments have enriched understanding of the Stalin era (the focus of so much earlier work) by adding comparative dimensions with other countries as well as within the span of Soviet history. I thus agree with Stefan Kirmse that “revisionism,” along with “totalitarianism,” should be consigned to the dustbin of historiography.

Lewis H. Siegelbaum is the Jack and Margaret Sweet Professor Emeritus of History at Michigan State University. He has published extensively on histories of Russia, Stalinism and life under Soviet rule.

Informing an archivist in the post-Soviet space about your plans to work on the international ties of a Soviet republic often elicits a broadly similar response: raised eyebrows, shrugged shoulders, followed by a laconic comment that “it was all done by Moscow anyway.”

Indeed, the classic narrative posits that the Soviet republics were Moscow’s pawns and had little agency of their own. That national identities were systematically repressed until at last, criticism of the Soviet system became possible under glasnost and perestroika. ‘Naturally’ this criticism came to be couched in national terms, and it was national mobilisation that led to, or at least dramatically accelerated, the collapse of the Soviet Union. Continue reading →

In recent years, approximately 72 million Europeans—representing 17% of the European Union’s population—have been classified as living in poverty. However, the current definitions of poverty have only been in use since the early 2000s. What, then, was the situation prior to that? Since when, and by what methods, has poverty been measured? What developments have taken place over the last century since the first conceptual frameworks emerged in Britain? Continue reading →

On 14 February 2025, I proudly defended my dissertation. After five years of wrestling with history, I was thrilled to have written a thesis that I could be proud of: The Lodging House and the City. Is this what it feels like to become a parent? Perhaps not entirely. I do not assume that new parents are asked if they perhaps like their baby too much. I was, when one of my jury-members asked if I had deliberately chosen the sacred day of Saint Valentine to declare my love for the lodging house as a bridgeway into questioning me on the rather optimistic narrative I had constructed. Had my “love” for the historical subject made me too blind to critically analyse it? Obviously, I had to disagree – I was there to defend, after all. But afterwards, it did trigger a reflection on how and why my research had pivoted in four years. Continue reading →