The London Journal

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A journal embracing all aspects of metropolitan society past & present | Published by Taylor & Francis for London Journal Trust | Articles & Special Issue proposals welcome | thelondonjournal.org

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The London Journal@thelondonjournal· 22d

The Houseless Shadow was a short film made by William Raban for the Museum of London’s 'Dickens and London' exhibition, juxtaposing readings from Dickens’s essay, ‘NightWalks’ with night-time images of contemporary London, using the connection to portray and historicise homelessness in the city.

A rough sleeper in a shop doorway in the Strand.

The London Journal@thelondonjournal· 22d

Directed by Steve McQueen and Josh Rogan, Uprising told the story of the 1981 New Cross Fire, using maps and archive footage to evoke the racial inequalities and tensions that informed popular understandings of its cause, and fuelled uprisings by Black communities in London and other British cities.

Police accompanying Black women silently protesting as part of the Black Peoples Day of Action in 1981.

The London Journal@thelondonjournal· 22d

The Gold centred on the 1983 Brink’s-Mat gold bullion robbery near Heathrow Airport, and nodded back to earlier London-based heist movies, while exploring the class consciousness and conflicts of the Thatcher era, as well as giving a prominent role to women characters within a masculine world.

Emun Elliott, Hugh Bonneville, and Charlotte Spencer as police detectives in The Gold.

The London Journal@thelondonjournal· 22d

Calvin has written a post for the journal blog to accompany this article, entitled 'Revisiting 1920s London Through a Chinese Lens', which you should also check out! www.thelondonjournal.org/blog.html#Goh

Gemma Chan as Soo Lin Yao in ‘The Blind Banker’ (2010).

The London Journal@thelondonjournal· 22d

New research article: 'Intertextuality, Intermediality, and Intervention: Re-Negotiating Early Literary Depictions of London’s Chinese Community Through The Murder of Mr Ma (2024)', by Calvin Goh: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Abstract
This article examines how intertextual and intermedial approaches facilitate revisionary practices in the representation of Chinese people living in London. I argue that the protagonists in John Shen Yen Nee and S. J. Rozan’s novel The Murder of Mr Ma (2024) grant the Chinese community a (semi-)representative voice that challenges earlier depictions of Chinese characters in literary fiction. My interest in the topic is inspired by how Chinese diaspora groups are represented in literature and what their treatment and experience may reflect of the cities in which they reside. I argue that the novel’s representations of the Chinese community subvert offensive stereotypes by highlighting the reality and impact of structural racism.

The London Journal@thelondonjournal· Jul 2

The museums are also tasked with ensuring the greater representation of marginalised groups (including women and People of Colour) as key contributors to their 'communities of knowledge', while also wrestling with the ethics of collections often amassed through colonial expansion and looting.

A plate from the Benin Bronzes at the British Museum.

The London Journal@thelondonjournal· Jul 2

These new objectives also include using digital technologies to enhance users' experience within the museums and increase their collections' accessibility; and also ensuring their sustainability as institutions, while addressing environmental themes more directly in their exhibitions.

The Great Auk exhibit at the British Museum.

The London Journal@thelondonjournal· Jul 2

The South Kensington Museum was founded in the wake of the 1851 Great Exhibition, and exhibited a combination of scientific and artistic objects (later split into the Science Museum and Victoria & Albert Museum respectively), and with and explicit purpose of serving the public.

The entrance to the Victoria and Albert Museum today.

The London Journal@thelondonjournal· Jul 2

Based in Bloomsbury, the original building was expanded to accommodate its growing collections, eventually being replaced with a new building opened in 1852, followed by the separate establishment of the Natural History Museum in South Kensington (1881) and the British Library (1973).

The London Journal@thelondonjournal· Jul 2

The British Museum was founded in 1753 by an Act of Parliament, and based upon Sir Hans Sloane's collection of books and objects. It was intended to offer a wide-ranging set of exhibits for educational purposes, and ostensibly for the benefit of the public (although access was in practice limited).

18th-century illustration of the British Museum.

The London Journal@thelondonjournal· Jun 18

Brick Lane Mosque was built in 1743 as a Huguenot Church and - reflecting the local history of migration - was later a synagogue, before local Bangladeshi Muslim group the London Jamme Masjid Trust bought it in 1976 and converted it into a mosque, eventually attaining permission to add a minaret.

Brick Lane Mosque exterior view showing minaret, 2021

The London Journal@thelondonjournal· Jun 18

Old Kent Road Mosque, meanwhile, was a Victorian former pub bought in 1993 by the Muslim Association of Nigeria UK, and internally refurbished while being used - until, with its congregation outgrowing the space available, it was demolished in 2021 with view to building a larger mosque on the site.

Old Kent Road Mosque's interior, prior to demolition.

The London Journal@thelondonjournal· Jun 18

For example, Harrow Mosque started life in 1985 with the conversion of two adjacent Edwardian houses, funded through grassroots efforts, with incremental conversion and sacralisation-through-use of its domestic interiors; it was eventually replaced by the purpose-built Harrow Central mosque in 2011.

Reconstruction of the mihrab from the Harrow house mosque.

The London Journal@thelondonjournal· Jun 15

New blog post by Ian Stone: 'With Due Acknowledgement: From Bermondsey’s Tanneries to The London Journal', reflecting on his research on the Leathersellers’ College in Bermondsey and its archival presence, and its place in his wider research and teaching: thelondonjournal.org/blog.html#St....

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The London Journal Blog
In these posts, our authors explore topics related to their published articles, including methodological or theoretical issues, matters of contemporary relevance, and questions raised by their research that need further investigation. We hope that reading these short pieces will enhance your understanding of the linked published articles and encourage new research on London.

With Due Acknowledgement: From Bermondsey’s Tanneries to The London Journal
By Ian Stone | Posted 15 June 2026

The acknowledgements of an academic article are a funny thing. They are probably passed over by most readers, whereas they might be the first—and indeed only—part of the article to attract the attention of others eagerly seeking evidence that their contribution to the published endeavour has been rightfully recognised. As a historian, I have always enjoyed reading the acknowledgements because they tell a story, albeit truncated, of how history came to be written. I thought I would expand upon the acknowledgements in my recent article on Leathersellers’ College in Bermondsey to set out the fuller story of how this article went from genesis to publication.

The London Journal@thelondonjournal· Jun 1

New post on our blog from Stephen Ridgwell: ‘Fugitive Material: The Case of the Nineteenth-Century Playbill’: thelondonjournal.org/blog.html#Ri...

A playbill sticker at work. John Orlando Parry, London Street Scene (1836). Wikimedia Commons.

The London Journal@thelondonjournal· May 28

New research article: 'Villadom, Burglary, and the Criminal Suburbanscape of London in the 1880s and 1890s', by Shu-chuan Yang: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Abstract
By addressing a specific intersection of suburban villadom and home security, this article interrogates how the offence of burglary carried deep implications for understanding the evolving concept of London’s criminal suburbanscape in the 1880s and 1890s. It argues that the popular representations of burglary in London-based periodicals not only reflect the social realities of criminality but also the history of crime and policing, weaving together the lived experience of London’s suburbanites. The expansion of villa suburbs typically carries connotations of fear and anxiety to involve thinking about the creation and dissemination of ‘the gentle art of burgling’, the growth of the private security industry, and the shifting significance of policing and crime prevention alongside the verbal and nonverbal representations of crime and criminals. At the heart of the article, therefore, are press depictions of how suburban burglary becomes an indicator for shaping visions of real-life exploits of criminals in the context of the New Journalism.

The London Journal@thelondonjournal· May 28

New research article: 'The Leathersellers’ College, Bermondsey: A National Centre for Technical Education in Leather Manufacturing', by Ian W. Stone: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Abstract
The Worshipful Company of Leathersellers worked with educational establishments, charities, and institutions of local government at the end of the nineteenth century to provide instruction in leather manufacturing in Bermondsey. Subsequently, firms (through their trade federations) and central government came to play a greater, even a dominant, role in supporting that education, although both its form and purpose were always contested. As manufacturing in Britain began to decline, and as government policy changed in the 1960s to support an expansion of further and higher education through broader institutions—colleges of technology, polytechnics, and universities—there was little place for specialist colleges like the Leathersellers’, and it eventually closed in 1978. Its history, then, affords us a valuable case study of the vicissitudes of vocational education in Britain and London.

The London Journal@thelondonjournal· Apr 7

New research note: 'The Report of Stanisław Adamczewski’s Internship at the Natural History Museum, 1946–1947: A Translated Edition', by Hubert Kowalskia and Wojciech J. Zabłocki: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Abstract
The German occupation of 1939–1945 left a huge mark on the capital of Poland. After the end of hostilities, Warsaw—ruined and looted—came back to life. For the State Zoological Museum, one of the ways to rebuild scientific life was to send employees on foreign internships. The Archives of the Museum and Zoological Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences contain a report by the entomologist Stanisław Adamczewski, who between October 1946 and October 1947 undertook an internship at the Natural History Museum in London. This several-page document is a description of the activities of the London museum that also reveals the situation in the country and the Polish reality. It is also a description of the enormous support provided by the British Council and English scientists to Polish researchers operating in extremely difficult conditions. The document, which has been translated in full here for the first time, also demonstrates the significance of international scientific contacts, especially in the aftermath of the war.

The London Journal@thelondonjournal· Mar 27

And we round off this section with 'Eyre and Eton in Camden: Uncovering the Colonial Histories of Three North London Housing Estates', by Edanur Yazici, Susannah Cramer-Greenbaum, Michael Keith, Karim Murji, Steve Pile & @baggieyiannis.bsky.social: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... (also OA)

Abstract
This article analyses the colonial histories of three north London housing estates. A kilometre apart from each other and built under different social policy conditions, Hilgrove, Chalcots, and Alexandra Road Estates all share colonial histories. We trace the role of the slave-holding Eyre Estate in influencing the architecture of Hilgrove Estate; uncover how the Eyre Estate clashed with residents and the London Borough of Camden over Alexandra Road Estate; and consider Eton College’s links to enslavement and its ownership of Chalcots Estate. We tell these histories with the aim of beginning a conversation around how to decolonise the way the city is known, linking the histories of the three estates with the colonialities of property and the welfare state. We do this to reflect on the implications a decolonial approach may have for new approaches to the history of public housing and the struggle for its future.

The London Journal@thelondonjournal· Mar 27

Our penultimate research article of the issue is 'The Establishment of the Great Central Gas Consumers’ Company in Mid-Nineteenth-Century London', by Chaojing Sun & Cheng Liu: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Abstract
The Great Central Gas Consumers’ Company (GCGCC) was established by the metropolitan middle class to address the detrimental effects of gas industry monopoly through the promotion of market competition. It revealed that the middle class staunchly advocated for the use of liberalism to safeguard their own rights and interests, coinciding with Britain’s wider acceptance of liberalism and echoing the clarion call of the era of liberalism. Government engagement and interference in the formation of the GCGCC, as well as the ensuing disputation around it, could be seen as a manifestation of the principle of liberalism rather than a violation thereof. It reflected that liberalism was neither the absence of government nor total laissez-faire. The fact that the old gas companies adjusted their positions and compromised in favour of liberal principles demonstrated the more flexible response mechanisms of the modern industrial system to industrial and social problems, as well as the significant influence of liberalism on the development of the British industrial sector and society as a whole.

The London Journal@thelondonjournal· Mar 27

This is followed by '‘Large Sums of Money are Always Ready’: Annuity Loans and Credit in Late Eighteenth-Century London', by Diane Clements: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... (Available open access)

Abstract
Studies of London’s financial market in the later eighteenth century have often focused on the market for public debt and the growth of institutional financial services. Consequently, the extent to which individual private lending continued to provide a means of credit has been overlooked. This article examines the practice of moneylending between 1770 and 1800 by thirty major financiers who were lending by purchasing life annuities from individual borrowers. It considers who they were, where they were based, and how they managed the associated risks. Lenders were drawn from a variety of social and economic backgrounds. They include men and women with private means and also those with commercial interests, attorneys, and financial intermediaries. Moneylending was not a fringe activity. Lenders worked collaboratively to a degree, and lived and worked alongside borrowers. They met a demand for individual financial provision not available from the contemporary banking system.

The London Journal@thelondonjournal· Mar 27

Next up is 'The Monarchs’ Bills of Mortality: A Geographical Analysis of Death in Seventeenth-Century London', by @jmotis.bsky.social and Katherine Kania: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Abstract
The London bills of mortality are most well known as printed broadsides produced for public consumption in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which informed early modern Londoners of mortality rates within their parishes. This article analyses a parallel and more detailed set of manuscript bills of mortality intended for the monarch in order to explore the geographical distribution of a wide variety of causes of death during the 1660s. When read alongside the printed bills, the monarchs’ bills of mortality provide new insight into the geography of epidemic disease outbreaks, as well as how infrastructural, socioeconomic, and environmental factors correlate with other historical death rates in seventeenth-century London.

The London Journal@thelondonjournal· Mar 27

We then have the first of our research articles, 'Trauma, ‘Socour’, and Friendship: Fifteenth-Century Widows at St Bartholomew's Hospital', by Nicole R. Rice: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Abstract
Widows made up a visible contingent of lay residents in the close of St Bartholomew's Hospital, Smithfield, in the mid-fifteenth century. Several of these women formed an intentional community of friends, some of whom had fled to the hospital in response to traumas including abduction and rape. Widowed friends Joan Astley, Alice Shipley, and Joan Newmarch formed an important audience for a literary anthology—now Bodleian Library MS Ashmole 59—copied by John Shirley. Shirley was an accomplished scribe and their neighbour in the close, and this article focuses on two poems that he copied successively into the volume: Lydgate's ‘A Freonde at Nede’ and Chaucer's ‘Fortune’. In different ways, the poems valorise friendship as ongoing support for those victimised by fortune. The literary works articulate ideals of friendship that align with the forms of community that widows created in the hospital close, a place of ‘succour’ where women found comfort and help from their ‘best friends’ in times of need.

The London Journal@thelondonjournal· Mar 5

New article: 'Symbolic Violence and ‘Branding’ in the Puritan Reformation of London, 1634–1660', by Paul Barrett: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.....

The London Journal@thelondonjournal· Jan 21

New research article: 'Strangers in the Marketplace: False Work and Foreigners in Late Medieval London', by @bethanyldonovan.bsky.social: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Abstract
In late medieval London, concerns about the quality and authenticity of consumer goods converged with growing anti-immigrant sentiment. Using three craft guilds—the Goldsmiths, the Pursers, and the Glaziers—as case studies, this article illustrates how Londoners came to directly link the perceived threats posed by foreigners and false craft work by the end of the fifteenth century. Analysing the rhetoric and regulations of these three varied groups of craftsmen, it provides insight into medieval Londoners’ attitudes towards strangers, as well as the construction of artisan identity, arguing that members of these guilds defined themselves both by their artisanal skill and in opposition to outsiders. They were able to unite and concretise these two facets of their identities by accusing foreigners of false work.

The London Journal@thelondonjournal· Dec 23

New research article: 'The Monarchs’ Bills of Mortality: A Geographical Analysis of Death in Seventeenth-Century London', by @jmotis.bsky.social and Katherine Kania: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

The London Journal@thelondonjournal· Nov 28

And last but not least, the 2024 Curriers Prize winning 'Stories from Smithfield: Markets and the Narration of London', by @jackhanlon.bsky.social: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Abstract
Throughout London’s history, marketplaces have not only been integral to its economy but also to how the city was imagined. Drawing on a diverse range of archives and sources—from tabloid journalism and film, through to oral history and photography—this article examines the ‘narration of London’ at one of the city’s most famous market sites, Smithfield. It focuses upon three moments when London’s meat market came to be seen as emblematic of the city’s story: as an ‘anvil’ for modernisation in the mid-nineteenth century; as an ‘insider’s’ account of the commercial empire in the early twentieth century; and as the last remnant of a ‘London lost’ on the eve of a new millennium. This article argues that the narrative power of the marketplace lies in its capacity for temporal rupture and connection—an ideal stage for dramatising the relationship between urban past and present. It shows how starkly and stereotypically gendered representations of Smithfield’s male workforce became one important means of understanding and articulating urban change.

The London Journal@thelondonjournal· Nov 28

Our penultimate research article of the issue is 'The Queen Catherine Court Slum Clearance Scheme: A Turning Point in the History of Social Housing in London', by Patricia Coveney Sears: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.....

Abstract
Maps provide a valuable resource to historians and genealogists, but the neat rows of compact houses in the courtyard of the Queen Catherine pub in Ratcliff, home to four of my Irish great-great-grandparents, only hint at the living conditions of its occupants. This article draws together evidence from newspapers, archival sources, censuses, and other genealogical records to provide a conjectural reconstruction of Queen Catherine Court. The overdevelopment and overcrowding of the site resulted in it being declared unfit for human habitation in 1888, but owing to decades of laissez-faire ideology and fragmented local government, slum clearance and the provision of social housing in London had been beset by intractable problems. A flagship project of the London County Council, the Queen Catherine Court scheme was finally brought to completion in 1903 by Stepney Borough Council, marking a first in the capital's history of social housing.

The London Journal@thelondonjournal· Nov 28

Followed by 'A Romani Capital? Romanies and London in the Eighteenth Century', by @jamesepeate.bsky.social: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Abstract
The history of Romanies in England during the eighteenth century has been largely neglected by existing historical scholarship. Yet, the Romani experience of and in London had a notable impact on the capital's culture and the ways in which Romanies or ‘Gypsies’ would be portrayed for years to come. This article explores how, in the early part of the century, the Romani settlement at Norwood in south London enabled interaction and integration between Londoners and their Romani neighbours. During the second half of the century, Norwood was enclosed, and interactions between Romanies and south Londoners diminished. What remained was an experience of Romani culture drawn primarily not through interactions with an established Romani population, but from a stereotypical ‘Cultural Gypsy’ that was portrayed in literature and on stage.

The London Journal@thelondonjournal· Nov 28

First up is 'The Politics of Wardship: A New Perspective on Societal Dissatisfaction and Civic Unrest in Late Fourteenth-Century London', by @dralrs.bsky.social: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....