Matthew Sangster
The purpose of this website is to explore London in the Romantic period by using Richard Horwood's 'PLAN of the Cities of LONDON and WESTMINSTER the Borough of SOUTHWARK, and PARTS adjoining Shewing every HOUSE' (1792-1799) both as a source of information in itself and as a means of locating and exploring other contemporary texts and images. The site hosts a digital version of the Horwood plan which can be annotated with words and images, manipulated and laid over modern digital maps. Over the course of this project, I plan on producing a series of annotated versions of Horwood's Plan which will use it to examine the representations and realities of life in the metropolis...
I'm interested in exploring the ways that poets and novelists interacted with the city in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries both in literature and in life, in mapping their works but also locating the places in London where they stayed, or visited friends, where they worked, or caroused, or laughed. In addition, I'm keen to think about the stories which get left out in the most famous literary versions of London from the period, about the profusions of industries, workhouses, prisons and commercial spaces which Horwood's Plan reveals, but which are often passed over in authors' representations of the city.
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7 November 2020
Very glad to be able to write that I’ve recently co-signed a contract with Oxford University Press to produce the first modern affordable edition of Pierce Egan’s Life in...
17 July 2017
As you’ll be able to see from the expanded header menu, I’ve recently added a series of new curations to the site, including plate series from John Thomas Smith’s...
John Tallis’s London Street Views
26 May 2017
A piece of mine called ‘Transformation and Specialization in London and its Topography’ has just been published by the Journal of Victorian Culture; this is part...
Picturing Places and the 1819 Plan
9 May 2017
The British Library has recently launched Picturing Places, a new resource exploring its rich topographical holdings. Many of the images used on this site – including the...