History of site updates
Most recent
2007
4 December 2007
I should have mentioned earlier that the National Archives will be closed from 1 to 16 December inclusive, because of building works.
2 December
Google Maps has added a terrain view, which may be helpful in seeing how a building or settlement fits into the geographical context.
30 November
Last night I attended an interesting lecture by Professor John Beckett, which made me realise that I had said nothing on my towns page about city status. That has now been rectified and a reference added to Prof. Beckett's book City Status in the United Kingdom, 1830-2002 (2005).
The current issue of The Local Historian has a useful handlist of local history websites, a few of which were new to me. One ambitious project is The Clergy of the Church of England Database, which aims to document the careers of all Church of England clergymen between 1540 and 1835. It is a work in progress, but already contains an impressive collection of information. Other online resources that I had not come across were the maps from the 1910 Baedeker guide to Great Britain, Christopher Harrison's online bibliography and vocabulary of manorial courts and Christopher Currie's lecture on English Gothic carpentry.
16 November
The British Library launched a new subscription-based service today - British Library Direct Plus. This expands the existing useful service - British Library Direct, which allows users to search across 20,000 journals since 2002 for free and order full text using a credit card. Direct Plus contains 67,000 journals and 400,000 conference proceedings, stretching back to the late 19th century. At the moment BL is offering free trials to organisations only.
8 November
British History Online has an attractive new look and continues to make resources available online. Among the latest additions are all six volumes of the Catalogue of Ancient Deeds (abstracts of medieval deeds held by The National Archives), which can be searched.
6 November
For some months the National
Galleries of Scotland have been building up their online
galleries of images, which include some of their collection of
topographical paintings, for example Thomas Girtin's view of the
cottages of Georgian Jedburgh (right). At the moment they
have images of 1,575 artworks out of a total of over 65,000,
helpfully arranged so that they can be browsed by subject, as well as
artist.
28 October
My list of online newspaper archives is growing. The Guardian 1821-1975 and The Observer 1900-1975 will be available from 3 November at the Guardian Digital Archive. The intention is to extend that coverage early next year to The Guardian (1821-2003) and The Observer (1791-2003). Searching is free of charge. However, if you want to view in full or print out material you will need to subscribe to a timed access pass.
26 October
The National Library of Scotland has added several hundred regional maps of Scotland from 1856 to 1936 to its online map collection.
I have added a new site search to my front page.
21 October
New research being carried out by Atkins for English Heritage (with the support of Historic Scotland) will chart the health of the various specialisms engaged in buildings history in the UK – principally applied architectural history, buildings history and buildings archaeology. Questionnaires are being sent to practitioners, heritage bodies and training providers and are also available to download. The deadline for responses is 9th November 2007 and the results of the survey will be available in early 2008.
17 October
The website for the London, Edinburgh, and Belfast Gazettes was recently relaunched. These official newpapers of record date back to 1665 and the archive is online. They became a standard place to announce corporate insolvency and business partnerships, in addition to official notices from government, so I have added a link from my business sources page.
16 October
By shamelessly cribbing from the excellent Map History by Tony Campbell, former Map Librarian at the British Library, I have improved my list of online images and maps again.
14 October
The British Library Newspapers Website will be launched on 22 October 2007, with 1,000,000 pages of content available for use by the Further Education and Higher Education community in the United Kingdom.The massive project to reconstruct the medieval Church of St Teilo is complete. It was dismantled from its original site at Llandeilo Tal-y-Bont and rebuilt at the National History Museum, St Fagans, Cardiff, where it will be open to the public from Monday. It has been restored to recreate its appearance in 1520, complete with copies of wall paintings uncovered as it was dismantled. This is the only example in Britain of a medieval church that has been moved to a museum.
7 October
I've been catching up with the activities of CAMRA. The Campaign's survey of historic pub interiors moved to its own website some months ago, and more volumes of its inventory have appeared in print, so my bibliography of pubs, inns and hotels has been updated.
6 October
Philip Davis has kindly pointed me in the direction of more online databases of sites and monuments records (or historic environment records as they are now known). So my gazetteers page has had an update.
3 October
Having taken the plunge into moving pictures last month, I have now added a couple more links to slideshows from YouTube, plus links to some of these interactive panoramas from the BBC. However I'm resisting the temptation to embed more YouTube offerings into my pages, as it increases the page load time.
28 September
The popular video-sharing site YouTube now has a number of videos and slideshows of buildings all over the world, scattered amongst its other offerings. The visual quality is varied; information on the building is often limited. However there are pearls among the dross, as you can see from the slideshow now embeded in my page on Gothic Revival architecture.
Historic New England, Wallpaper in New England provides a history and online database of its large collection of wallpapers from the 1750s to the 1950s. Most of the Georgian examples were imported from England; there are also papers from China.
The move to this site's new domain left a few loose ends. Today I have been tidying up dead links.
26 September
At last my list of historic images available online has a section for Cornwall. A few other additions have been made to it. Also the online databases of historic photographs at the Universities of Aberdeen and St Andrews have been added to the page on university archives.
21 September
My page on castles has been expanded to consider some of the non-miliary aspects of castles.
17 September
This site has been moved to its own domain. Since the Rollyo site search has been little used, this seems like a good time to remove it. The advertising on the search results was irritating.
11 September
Thanks to the digitisation schemes by Google and MSN (and the older Project Gutenberg), the Text Archive maintained by the Internet Archive now contains over a quarter of a million items. Among the British and Irish publications are local history, volumes published by local record societies, and historic periodicals such as Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. Use Live Search Books or Google Book Search to locate titles or search the full text.My page on parsonages has grown again.
8 September
The Tiles and Architectural Ceramics Society published Lynn Pearson, The Tile Gazetteer: A Guide to British Tile and Architectural Ceramics Locations in 2005 covering England, Scotland, Wales and the Isle of Man. Now it also provides an updated online database.Continuing the theme of tiles, I have added a little something on W. J. Neatby's work to my page on Art Nouveau.
28 August
A few additions have been made to my list of online image sources, thanks to Project Gutenberg making ever more out-of-print books available online.
24-6 August
A minor reorganisation and correction of my list of English national archives was in order, to keep up to date. A few additions have been made to the text and bibliography of my brief history of villages.
17 August
Until 15 October the National Museum of Ireland - Decorative Arts and History is showing an exhibition titled Whitewash and Thatch, formed from a collection of plans and elevations of thatched cottages, made in the first half of the 20th century by visiting Swedish scholars and by students at the UCD School of Architecture. The exhibition was first shown in the Country Life branch of the museum at Turlough Park, which normally houses the collection. An entry for the Country Life branch has been added to my page on Irish archives.
15 August
German translation software company Babylon now offers a collection of free English to Latin and Latin to English dictionaries, which can be used online or downloaded. A link has been added from my manscript aids page.
9 August
Dr Rachel Cosgrave, Deputy Archivist, Lambeth Palace Library has drawn my attention to the joint online catalogue for the manuscript and archive collections held at Lambeth Palace Library and the Church of England Record Centre. It is a work in progress, but already includes records of HM Commissioners for Building New Churches, 1818-1856.
The Irish Historic Towns Atlas continues with the second volume on Belfast now out. The volume on Armargh will be published in October.
5 August
Back in May the National Archives lauched a wiki called Your Archives, intended for users to contribute their knowledge of archival sources throughout the UK, though the focus is strongly on the those held by the National Archives. The wiki is still in beta, but already has 60 articles in the category Monuments and buildings. Some make available unpublished guides to sources for certain types of government-funded buildings, such as prisons. I have linked to these from my page on public buildings. Also an article by Aidan Lawes on sources for the dissolution of monasteries and chantries has been republished; I have linked to it from relevant pages.
2 August
The collection of the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales can now be searched online through its new database Coflein. It records thousands of archaeological sites, monuments, buildings and maritime sites in Wales, as well as indexing the drawings, manuscripts and photographs held in the NMRW archive collections. Not all information in the huge collection is included, but some photographs have been digitised and more will gradually become available online.
My slim page on parsonages has been expanded a shade. One or two new titles have been added to my bibliographies and links checked.
29 July
Although the RIBA Library is now closed for repainting, access to the extensive photograph collection is available online via RIBApix.
Bedfordshire Libraries have put together How We Built Bedfordshire: a guide to historic buildings in the county, with modern and historic images.
26 July
Between 2007 and 2009 the Bodleian Library intends to digitise over 65,000 items from its vast John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera, which includes trade cards and other business ephemera. The first images should be available by the end of this year. In the meantime there is an online text catalogue.
The British Architectural Library, at the headquarters of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), will be closing for reburbishment for 7 weeks during August and September. The last day of opening will be Saturday 28 July. The huge RIBA drawings collection has now been moved to the Victoria and Albert Museum, where items from it can be viewed in the RIBA Architecture Study Rooms.
24 July
The Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland will launch The Sir Basil Spence Archive in August, to coincide with the centenary of the architect’s birth. This archive comprises 40,000 drawings, photographs, models and personal documents donated by the Spence family to RCAHMS. In August a touring exhibition will draw on the archive, ending at the Dean Gallery in Edinburgh from October to February 2008.
13 June
An introduction has been added to my style guide.
29 May
A paragraph on the department store and its antecedents has been added to the page on shops.
27 April
Information on trade cards has been expanded a trifle.
22 April
The National Archives now offers an online tutorial in advanced Latin, to follow on from the Beginner's Latin that it has been offering for some time. I have now separated Latin tutorials from dictionaries on my page listing aids to manuscript reading.
Over the last month I have a few titles to bibliographies here and there.
23 March
More indexes of historic local newspapers are coming online, so I now have a list on my local libraries page. I look forward to the launch of the British Library's massive newspaper digitalisation project, promised for the middle of 2007.
22 March
From this month until June the Irish
Architectural Archive is hosting Decorating the
Georgian Interior
: an exhibition of selected drawings
from the National Library’s collection of designs by Michael Stapleton
(1747-1801), the most skilled stuccodor working in
the Adam style that dominated Dublin interior
decoration in the last decades of the 18th century. There is
to be an associated book. The
Stapleton Collection, Designs for the Irish neoclassical interior
by Conor Lucey will be published on 29 March.
20 March
This site now has its own domain - buildinghistory.org. That should be easier to remember! At the moment it simply redirects to the current site. I hope to move the site properly once I have hosting organised (and can find the time.)
I have only just realised that in November 2006 the Manorial Documents Register expanded its online coverage to include Cumberland, Westmorland and Lancashire north of the sands.
My page on monasteries has been updated to include links to various monastic records now available online. My page on Archives in North America has been updated to include the manuscript collection of Harvard Law School, which includes c.1000 English deeds, calendared online.
23 February
The Archaeology Data Service continues to expand its online offerings. It now has quite a collection of the county-by-county Historic Town Assessments which are being supported by English Heritage. Also the booklets published last year on historic farmsteads by English Heritage, The Countryside Agency and The University of Gloucestershire can be downloaded from ADS in pdf format.
ADS is also hosting the searchable online version of vols. 3 and 4 of the Bibliography of Vernacular Architecture and the Cruck Database for the Vernacular Architecture Group.
13 February
The useful A Vision of Britain has now digitised the 1610 edition in English of William Camden's Britannia - the first published topographical survey of the British Isles. A link to it has been added to my ever-growing list of primary sources in print.
11 February
My page on railway architecture has been expanded to include the London Underground.
8 February
My page on banks has been expanded. Links have been checked site-wide.
7 February
Philip Davis has just drawn my attention to the fact that his website The Gatehouse - an online gazetteer of castles and other fortifications in England and Wales 1100-1600 - now has a list of licences to crenellate.
British History Online digitalised additional medieval sources in January. Staffordshire was particularly well served through the addition of a number of volumes of Collections for a History of Staffordshire.
2006
11 December 2006
My coverage of building regulations and the records they have generated has hitherto been sketchy in the extreme. So I've written a history of building control in the British Isles. It is in scholarly format, which is a new departure for Researching Historic Buildings. The notes pop up in the screen version, but will print out as footnotes.
7 December
In November last year Microsoft announced its library scanning initiative. Now tens of thousands of out-of-copyright books from several libraries, including the British Library, have been made available online through this scheme. They can be searched via the new Live Search Books. Clicking on a result brings up the book to read online or download.
26 November
Because of the overlap between architecture and civil engineering, I have added the Institution of Civil Engineers to national archives in England and bridges, and the Biographical Dictionary of Civil Engineers to the page of similar works on architects.
25 November
The latest volume of the is Irish Historic Towns Atlas is out. It covers Dundalk.
23 November
Jane Wardropper, PhD student at the University of Birmingham, has discovered that 40 hospitals in Great Britain were built by industrialists for their workers before the National Health Service. That is worth adding to my page on charity buildings.
The excellent British History Online grows ever more useful. It now has online Victorian OS maps at scale 1:2500 for Birmingham, Cardiff, Chester, Chichester, Colchester, Coventry, Durham, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Lichfield, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Oxford, Portsmouth, Salisbury, Southampton, Winchester, Worcester, York and much of central London, as well as the complete 1:10,560 series of OS maps for Great Britain, which was already online at Old Maps. Other material freshly digitised in the last month or two includes:
- Samuel Lewis, A Topographical Dictionary of England (7th edn. 1848)
- Samuel and Daniel Lysons, Magna Britannia volumes 3 to 6 (1814-22), covering Cornwall, Cumberland, Derbyshire and Devonshire
- Volumes 23 and 26 of the Survey of London, covering Lambeth.
- Volumes 3 to 5 of John Hobson Matthews (ed.), Cardiff Records.
19 November
The bibliographies of public buildings have been enlarged and amalgamated.
13-14 November
The latest version of Google Earth offers a small selection of historical maps from the David Rumsey Map Collection, including England and Wales in 1790 (John Rocque) and London in 1843 (B.R. Davies). These are available via the featured content option.
The page on maps is updated accordingly, and some unconnected revisions and additions made to the pages on towns and theatres.30 October
The bibliographies for Gothic and Gothic Revival have been updated
27 October
A little more added to Art Nouveau.
22 October
Generally I try to restrict myself to listing books in my bibliographies. If I were to include articles as well, the bibliographies would become overwhelmingly large, not to mention a full-time job to maintain. Instead I refer my readers to the excellent online The British and Irish Archaeological Bibliography (which covers much architectural history.)
However
I have made a few exceptions for specialised topics. Dovecotes
has now joined them. This page has proved popular since it was
created. I hope that the improved version,
with expanded description, history and
bibliography, will be more useful.
18 October
I should have mentioned earlier this year that almost all English public libraries now offer access to Oxford Reference Online, which includes the excellent Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004; online updates 3 times a year) and A Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, 2nd edn. (2006).
With
books coming online at a dizzying rate, I thought I'd add a few clues
to locating them. See the new online section of finding
the book you want.
25 September
The page on inns, hotels and pubs has been beefed up.
24 September
New material this month at British History Online includes Samuel Lewis, A Topographical Dictionary of Wales, 4th edn (1849), the first two volumes of John Hobson Matthews (ed.) Cardiff Records (1898, 1900), Register and Records of Holm Cultram (the cartulary and other records of a Cistercian house in Cumberland) and more volumes of the Survey of London.
The Irish National Inventory of Architectural Heritage has published two more county volumes: Offaly and Kilkenny.
The Papar Project is researching all the places in the Northern Isles of Scotland (Orkney and Shetland) and Caithness which have the name Papay, meaning 'the island of the priests' and Papil, meaning 'the settlement of the priests'. A note on this added to my page on early sources for The Church.
18 September
The new Microsoft Internet search, called Windows Live, is now fully functional. It surpasses even the excellent Google Maps in its usefulness for looking at buildings from the air. Try a local search and then click 'maps'. For many metropolitan areas, you are offered a choice of map, aerial view and bird's-eye view from various directions. For the latter the scale is large enough to see roof detail.
9 September
The Royal Irish Academy has a new online exhibition As I Walked Out ... a moving photographic memoir of Dublin in ruins, May 1916, by T.J. Westropp.
6 September
Though Britain did not feel the full effects of Art Nouveau on its architecture, I have added a page on the style.
Google is now offering a News Archive Search which goes back 200 years, in partnership with the biggest names of the American press and UK's Guardian and Independent. The results include both free and pay-to-view material. It you don't care to pay, you could simply note the details and track down the article at your local library in many cases. So this is another helpful tool for researchers.
1 September
The bibliography for villages
has been updated and expanded.
29 August
The international union library catalogue WorldCat can now be searched direct, as well as via Google and Yahoo!
The bibliography of historic interiors now has a small sub-section on wallpapers.
15 August
The bibliography for pubs and inns has been updated.
11 August
The list of probate inventories in print is growing ever longer, so I have broken it up by county.
9 August
The final touches (I hope) have been made to the mini-redesign. The "skip to content" link top right is to enable screen readers to by-pass the top menu. Some images have been re-scanned so that they show up equally well in either the standard or the easy-read style.
4 August
The National Archives has made The Domesday Book available online. Search for a place or person is free, but downloading a page costs £3.50. What you get for your money is a colour images of a Domesday folio, along with the Editions Alecto translation. This is considerably cheaper than the similar service that has been offered since 2004 by the commercial Domesday Extracts. However it is aimed more at those who want something attractive to hang on the wall than t he serious researcher. An individual entry pulled out of its context is of limited use. So I will carry on using the Phillimore printed edition. Digital versions of the complete work are available from both Phillimore and Alecto on CD-ROM.
31 July
Added a few more regional studies to the bibliography on vernacular architecture.
30 July
And now you can see the point of the easy read option. It frees me to add background patterns to the standard version. These might present problems to the reader with poor vision, even if they set their browser to enlarge the text. I promise that the penny plain version will never have background images. That more or less completes my recent mini-redesign. Most of the work has gone on under the hood, coding to assist screen readers.
27 July
As you can see top right, there is now an an option to read this site in large print, light on dark. The style switcher requires javascript to be enabled. Alternatively those using Firefox or Opera can use the browser view menu to change styles.
25 July
Catching up with progress at British History Online, I see that all six volumes of Old and New London (1878) are now online, together with the first three volumes of Extracts from the Records of the Burgh of Glasgow, additional sources for London and ever more volumes of the Victoria County History of England .
10 July
As predicted Archive Grid now requires a subscription. This is disappointing. I have removed it from the list of combined online archive catalogues, since I don't want to point people towards a charging database, when those of most use to researchers in the British Isles remain free.
Chores done. Links checked. Site validated.
7 July
All the Magalotti images have now been scanned, apart from that of Maiden Castle, and two additional views of Audley End. The view of London and Westminster is too large to scan in full, but a part of the Westminster stretch is included.
5 July
For those who want to see the full picture, I have added a couple more of the larger Magalotti images. Navigation has been improved for that section. I may scan a few more of these interesting images.
Some formatting has been done especially for those of you using the Firefox or Opera browsers. You can now see the titles of images by hovering over them with the mouse, as those using Internet Explorer could always do. Those using Opera can use the arrows on their browser to navigate books and articles with multiple pages, such as Inns of Old London or Heritage of Mercy: Medieval hospitals.
25 June
The Manuscripts and Special Collections of the University of Nottingham now provides an online tutorial in manuscripts skills, covering the dating of old records, and understanding deeds and manorial records. It includes a glossary, bibliographies and quizzes to check your progress. This is a useful addition to the growing number of online guides and dictionaries listed on my manuscript aids page.
20-22 June
The staff of archives, libraries and museums in Bedfordshire, Berkshire, Cambridgeshire, Derbyshire, Essex, Kent, Lancashire, Lincolnshire, Norfolk, Northamptonshire, Nottinghamshire, Somerset, Suffolk, Wiltshire and Worcestershire have been busy putting maps and topographical images online. See the new sections for those counties in my list of online image collections plus additions for Hampshire and London: Lambeth Archives now has a large part of its huge collection of photographs and other images online.
The Museums, Libraries and Archives Council launched a combined collection search last October at Discover. (Yes - I'm late with the news.) It includes material from English Heritage's ViewFinder and the British Library's Collect Britain. Search can be frustrating, as text, image and bibliographic databases are mingled, with no easy way to filter the search by type of material. However you can use the detailed search option to specify only results with thumbnail images.
16 June
The National Archives has devised a handy online currency converter to translate yesterday's money values into today's. This will be a boon and a blessing to researchers delving into building accounts.
Meanwhile a shadow has fallen over the Archive Grid. Back in March I announced the arrival of this ambitious international effort to create a unified online archive catalogue for the English-speaking world. Now the body that created it - RLG - is merging with the Online Computer Library Center from 1 July. So all that they can promise is that the Archive Grid will remain free until 30 June.
3 June
The Society of Antiquaries of London now appears in my list of National Archives in England. It should have been listed last year, when its programme of online cataloguing made its archive far more accessible to non-Fellows.
26 May
My bibliography of place-name studies has been updated to reflect the current research on Irish place names.
22 May
You can now search over 28 million catalogue references, documents and archive locations in one easy step. The National Archives has unveiled its new Global Search, which simultaneously brings up results from its own catalogue and website, Access to Archives (A2A), the National Register of Archives (NRA) and Archon.
21 May
My bibliography for nonconformist chapels has been updated, and related organisations given their own heading. Links checked.
17 May
I'm afraid I keep adding to the already lengthy bibliography on the history of towns.
8-9 May
Bath Past and Bristol Past now have their own search boxes, so you can search just those sub-sites, though they can also be searched from the search boxes on Researching Historic Buildings.
A little more detail has been added to the list of ecclesiastical surveys, to clarify the geographical areas covered by each.
5 May
The now-departed search page had a few clues to navigating this website, which have been worked into a quick prompter for the front page.
The Royal Historical Society's online guide to serial Texts and Calendars (see news 9 March below) is now complete.
2 May
Library Ireland has put online a large number of out-of-print books and articles about Ireland, including Victorian directories and the useful Topographical Dictionary of Ireland (1837), published by Samuel Lewis. Meanwhile his A Topographical Dictionary of Scotland (1846) has gone online at British History Online.
25 April
The search page has now been replaced by the more convenient search box, which you will find on most pages. Courtesy of Rollyo and Yahoo, it offers options to search this site, or this one together with a selection of others useful for British and Irish architectural history, or the whole Web.
23 April
Sharman Kadish is constantly adding to our understanding of the British synagogue. I have linked to a bibliography on the topic that he has compiled, as it is fuller than mine. And I can't resist mentioning his gazetteer Jewish Heritage in England: An Architectural Guide, although it is not out until September.
The 1841 census returns are now online with later ones at Ancestry.co.uk (England, Wales, The Channel Isles and Isle of Man) and Scotland's People (Scotland).
19 April
British Library Online Newspaper Archive bids fair to be an excellent resource for historical research. The demonstration model is limited to a selection of national newspapers and years, which is enough to see the potential. A word of warning: it requires Internet Explorer for full functionality.
The British Library is one of the partners of the UK Web Archiving Consortium, which will be archiving this website in future. So should the day come when I can no longer maintain it, at least a copy will remain available. The site is already archived, along with millions of others, by the Internet Archive.
12 April
The removal of the NGfL logo has left some space in the left menu to try out a Rollyo search box. If this works well it could replace the search page.
10 April
The National Grid for Learning is closing down on 13 April. So the links I had to it on every page have now disappeared.
4 April
Continuing work on my history of towns, which needed a word or two at least on the Jacobean towns of Ireland. While I was in settlement mood, I added a little on lost villages to the history of villages.
3 April
A bibliography of historic interiors has been created, my bibliography of vernacular architecture has been beefed up and a scattering of additions made to other bibliographies. My history of towns has grown a little longer, to take it into the new towns of the post-war era.
31 March
My redesign of this website in November 2004 seems to have triggered some filter in Google. I thought the problem would be temporary, but 16 months on, it is still almost impossible to find this site using Google. I therefore recommend the use of another search engine for those who wish to return and do not have the site bookmarked.
20 March
Updated my mills page to add some sources for mills in Ireland. On that topic the March/April issue of British Archaeology has an article on the remarkable excavation at Raystown, County Meath, which has uncovered remains of no less than eight mills, dating from the 7th to the 10th centuries.
11 March
An ambitious addition to the growing array of unified online archive catalogues is Archive Grid. This is an international collaboration, which pulls together collection descriptions from thousands of libraries, museums, and archives across the English-speaking world.
Updated my image indexes to include a few for Yorkshire. As this page was getting so long, I have removed the double-listing under region and period. Sources should now be under one or the other. While my mind was on Yorkshire, I updated my entry for the Borthwick Institute Archives, which now has a useful online guide to the wealth of material it holds for churches of the Archdiocese of York.
Links to background information have been added to my page on medieval trefi and there has been a slight revamp of my towns bibliography, with a couple of regional studies added.
9 March
Back in December I reported that The Royal Historical Society had taken over responsibility for the online supplement to Mullins, Texts and Calendars and Stevenson, Scottish Texts and Calendars. In fact the society is doing better than that. It is making use of its online Bibliography of British and Irish History to provide full lists of serial record publications, both the volumes covered by Mullins and Stevenson and more recent ones. Record societies and bodies are listed alphabetically, with a link to a list of their publications drawn from the bibliography. So far the list covers A-M.
7 March
Links have been checked site-wide. One or two more items have been added to bibliographies.
26 February
Returned to town walls to add a morsel on gates.
25 February
I've tinkered with my maps page: a little addition and revision.
24 February
The introduction to the development of market halls has been expanded. A few more references have been added there and elsewhere.
11 February
I'm afraid that I have added yet more to my already lengthy bibliography of towns, and plugged a gap or two in town walls.
9 February
The National Archives now provides Beginner's Latin: an online tutorial on the Latin used in documents between 1086 and 1733. Link added to my list of aids to reading, translating and understanding manuscripts.
6 February
A section on concrete and mortar has been added to the bibliography of building materials.
4 February
My text on chapels has been built up to give a better introduction to the various types of chapel.
3 February
I've just noticed that an electronic catalogue of enclosure maps of England and Wales is online, to go with the book by Roger J. P. Kain, John Chapman, and Richard R. Oliver, The Enclosure Maps of England and Wales, 1595-1918 (Cambridge University Press, 2004). A useful addition to my pages on maps and farm buildings.
30 January
The site has a new printout style. By the magic of CSS, if you print out pages, you get black on white text, without the navigation menus at the top and left-hand side. Images will still print in colour, if you set your printer to colour. (This was available for most pages from 17 January, but it was completed today.)
25 January
Colin Thom of the Survey of London tells me that more volumes are now online. Vols. 31-32 (St James's), 33-34 (Soho) and 39-40 (Grosvenor Estate, Mayfair) are now available at British History Online, joining vols. 29-30 which went online in early December. Rapid progress! It's part of an English Heritage-funded project to digitise all 45 of the parish volumes, which should be completed by September 2008. My gazetteers and towns pages have been updated accordingly.
He also nudged me in the direction of his new book Researching London's Houses. That makes a useful addition to my increasing pile of house research guides.
20 January
A question on estate villages led me to expand on the topic just a shade and add one or two more references.
3 January
Happy New Year! Geoff Evans has just pointed out to me that English Monastic Archives is up and running. A team at University College London has created online databases of monastic houses, their properties and archives. The project is still in progress and there is much more information yet to add, but I am delighted that UCL has made it available in its provisional state, for it is remarkably useful as it stands.
2005
8 December
The Royal Historical Society has now assumed responsibility for the online supplement to Mullins, Texts and Calendars and Stevenson, Scottish Texts and Calendars, previously maintained by the National Register of Archives, but which has not been available for some time. From early 2006 serial record publications subsequent to 1982 (England and Wales) or 1985 (Scotland) will be listed online. At the moment there is a workaround whereby a list can be found using a search of the online Bibliography of British and Irish History.
Vols. 29 and 30 of the Survey of London are now available online. They cover St James, Westminster.
6 December
Educational buildings and their records is a huge topic, which really needed its own page. Now it has one. My apologies for the length.
2 December
My bibliography of town history was getting so massive, that I have chopped it up into sections, with some additions and deletions.
17 November
My bibliography of materials has expanded, with the flurry of books on cob in the last few years.
12 November
The 1851 census returns can now be searched online at Ancestry.co.uk. My material on census returns seems to be growing rapidly. It lives on the houses page.
Having had a mad urge expand my list of probate inventories in print, there is now so much on wills and probate inventories that it makes sense to bring them together on their own page. There have been various other small additions and updates scattered about.
4 November
The British Library and Microsoft have come together to digitise around 100,000 out-of-copyright books from the Library's collections and deliver search results for this content through the newly announced MSN Book Search, which should be available next year.
British History Online continues to expand its collection of digitised texts, which now includes the some of the older volumes of the Victoria County History of England, as well as the most recent, and The Commissions for building fifty new churches 1711-27 ed. M.H. Port (1986): records of the body charged with building new churches for London after the Great Fire.
27 October
Some additions have been made to my list of publications on building materials.
14 October
The National Library of Ireland has been gradually adding images to its online catalogue, which currently includes some 5,000 ditigal images of prints and drawings, and a selection of the library's huge holdings of photographs, which was expanded last year by some major acquisitions. This seems a good moment to update my listing for the library and to create a section for Ireland in my image indexes.
James Millerd's map of Bristol in 1673 is now online in Bristol Past, with full-size images of the inset depictions of Bristol's buildings (note: the latter are large files).
9 October
The National Archives will be among the contributors to a new venture to digitise books and other materials and put them online. The Open Content Alliance was conceived by the Internet Archive and Yahoo!
14 September
William FitzStephen's description of London in about 1180 has been added to the section on primary sources.
10 September
Liam's Pictures from Old Books includes hundreds of scanned images of British and Irish buildings from out-of-copyright works, so I have been busy today adding links to the individual book galleries from my page on image indexes.
4 September
Newly added to the selection of primary sources is the building lease for a tidal mill at Eling dated 1418.
1 September
An article on Bristol Bridge is now online at Bristol Past. Links have been checked site-wide.
19 August
Over the last week or two I have been adding a little to my brief history of British towns, including the garden city concept and a link to the study by Queen's University, Belfast Mapping the Medieval Urban Landscape, which looks at Edward I's town planations in Wales.
9 August
The Archif Melville Richards database of Welsh place names and their historical meanings was launched earlier this month by the University of Wales, Bangor. It has been compiled by the Place Name Research Centre at Bangor from the painstaking research of the late Professor Melville Richards. A link has been added from the bibliography of place-names.
Over the last month there have been a few other additions to this site, including extra text on charity sources and a couple more sources for Trefi.
9 July
The online database of the Taxatio Ecclesiastica is once more operational, but at a new address. It has moved to the Humanities Research Institute at the University of Sheffield.
An article on Acton Court is now online at Bristol Past.
The pages on bridges and factories have been expanded. Links have been checked site-wide.
21 June
The online version of the The British and Irish Archaeological Bibliography is once more free to all (after a period restricted to subscribers.) It covers publications (books and articles) from 1695 to the present day on archaeology and historic buildings.
9 June
Census returns for England, Wales, The Channel Isles and Isle of Man are now online for 1861, 1871, 1881, 1891 at Ancestry.co.uk. They can be searched online free, but there is a small fee for downloads from the actual census entry. The Census returns for England and Wales in 1901 were first put online in 2002 on the National Archives site. Now they too are available from Ancestry.co.uk.
7 June
The latest volumes from The National Inventory of Architectural Heritage (Ireland) have been added to the page on inventories.
For those interested in Bristol, my magazine articles on aspects of its history are now online at Bristol Past.
20 May
The Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi is an international research project dedicated to the publication of medieval stained glass. The section for great Britain has made thousands of images available online in a searchable database. A link to it is one of several additions to Image Indexes.
In checking the links on this site, I find that English Heritage no longer has its monument class descriptions online.
22 April
A database of over 4100 drawings and museum objects from the collections of the Society of Antiquaries of London is now available online through The Archaeology Data Service. The collections include over 400 drawings and plans of historic buildings.
27 March
The British Library's unparalleled collection of early maps and images of the British Isles can now be seen online at Collect Britain. This includes the bird's-eye views of the coasts of England commissioned by Henry VIII. The collection covers the period 800 to 1600.
22 March
The Anglo-Saxon charter recording the establishment of Worcester as a fortified borough has been added to the selection of primary sources.
19 March
Content on street and trade directories has been augmented. I'm pleased to find that some Irish directories are online at Fáilte Romhat. There is now a section under local history for bibliographies of directories.
13 March
Since I only had one line on the wonderful source that is probate inventories, that has has now been expanded into a paragraph.
10 March
I'm experimenting with site search plus, courtesy of Gigablast. This allows you to search not only this website, but a selection of others with one query. It's a mini search engine for British and Irish architectural history.
9 March
A link has been added to the Ordnance Survey's online guide to Britain's place-names, which includes glossaries of Gaelic, Scandinavian, Scots and Welsh elements in British place-names. This seems a good moment to list place-name publications under their own heading in the bibliography for local history.
7 March
Another useful lottery-funded project is A Vision of Britain Through Time, which offers basic data and historic maps for places in Great Britain from 1801 to 2001. It draws its data mainly from census reports. But it also offers the full text of some classic traveller's tales. Links have been added to them individually from my page on primary sources in print.
23 February
Additions made to the bibliography of historic maps.
19 February
The National Archives in partnership with University College London has created a web tutorial on paleography covering the handwriting of documents written in English between 1500 and 1800. It joins my list of aids to reading manuscripts.
7 February
Additions have been made to the bibliography on bridges, thanks to Geoff Evans.
5 February
A page has been added on medieval land-holding in Wales. Yet more has been squeezed onto my lengthy page on castles. I couldn't resist adding references to accounts in print for specific castles.
1 February
My coverage of medieval wills has been expanded to include Ireland and Scotland, though mainly to say that no pre-1500 wills survive from either country, so don't get too excited.
14 January
Links have been added to Bricks and Brass, Simon Tyrrell-Lewis's guide to period houses, focusing on the Victorian and Edwardian periods. Among other things, he offers an intriguing dating tool. Answer a series of multiple-choice questions about your house and its date will be estimated.
7 January
A link has been added to Robin Alston's Country House Database. He lists country houses from late medieval times to c.1850 in the whole of the British Isles, pointing to sources for each house.
2 January
Some additions have been made to the bibliography of building materials.
2004
15 December
The Illustrated London News is in the process of digitising its vast collection of images from 1842 onwards. A selection is already available online. This is welcome, as Postaprint no longer provides an online index of images from the ILN. So an update to the image indexes was overdue. Some additions have been made.
12 December
A page on bridges has been added. So bridge chapels are now on that page.
7 December
A link added to the Artists' Papers Register, which includes the papers of architects, architectural historians and architectural artists in repositories in the UK. Selecting "artist type search" and then 'architects' or 'architectural practices' will bring up an alphabetical list.
An article on the Circus, Bath has been added to Bath Past.
4 December
The Courtauld Institute of Art has always been a marvellous resource for researchers. Now you can search its huge collections of paintings, drawings, and photographs of architecture and sculpture and order photographic prints online at Art and Architecture.
The publications of the Irish National Inventory of Architectural Heritage have been added to the page on official gazetteers.
Structural Images of the North-East makes a useful addition to the image indexes.
After a good deal of arduous labour, this site now conforms to Web standards.
2 December
Added an article on the 18th-century topographical drawings of Samuel H. Grimm. Also a little something on tide mills has been added to the Mills page, at the request of Jeremy Greenwood.
27 November
Added links to the Edwin C. Bolles collection at Tufts University of publications, maps and images on the history and topography of London, which can be searched online.
22 November
Google has released a new search tool for academic research. Google Scholar is still in beta, but a very welcome development. It includes search of the world's largest combined library catalogue. More on that in my notes on finding a book.
17 November
Finally I have abandoned frames for the site design. Now it should be easier to bookmark individual pages. I took the opportunity to reshuffle some pages. My apologies to anyone who has to update links or bookmarks.
And as you see, there is a new title. Sources for Building History expanded over the years from simple lists of sources to a fuller guide to researching historic buildings, so it seemed time for a change. There has also been an update of text and links.
Humbul, together with the Institute of Historical Research, have published a booklet called Internet Resources for History. There is an online version as well. They have selected some of the most useful websites for historical research and give their own helpful review of each site.
7 November
A2A (Access to Archives) has been continually growing since it first went online. It now contains more than 7.2 million catalogue entries, in over 83,000 catalogue files, describing archives held in 368 record offices, libraries, museums and other repositories throughout England.
29 October
Wales now has a section on the page of image catalogues.
29 August
A warm welcome to a new website. The National Inventory of Architectural Heritage of the Republic of Ireland is building an illustrated online gazetteer. It currently covers the counties of Kildare, Meath, South Dublin and Waterford. It is well-organised and searchable in various ways.
18 August
The Public Monument and Sculpture Association National Recording Project aims to catalogue every piece of public sculpture and every public monument in the British Isles. It includes sculpture on buildings.
7 July
Links have been added to ViewFinder, a searchable database of photographs from the English Heritage National Monuments Record's collections. It includes 2,800 photographs by Eric de Maré (1910-2002), who was particularly interested in canals, bridges and industrial architecture, and 13,800 by Henry W. Taunt, who focused on Oxfordshire and surrounding counties 1860-1922.
25 June
Geoff Evans sent me some suggestions for more books on dovecotes, which jogged me into creating a page for dovecotes, which previously just had a brief mention on the farms page.
31 May
Additions to the bibliography of building materials.
21 April
British History Online was launched last year by the Institute of Historical Research and the History of Parliament Trust. Its online collection is growing fast. It now includes the full text of the latest volumes of the Victoria County History of England and a number of useful sources for the history of London, such as gazetteers, directories, and Hearth Tax returns.
10 March
Somerset has joined the ranks of those counties who have been able to put useful databases online through lottery funding. Somerset Historic Environment Record gives information on archaeological sites, monuments and buildings in the current county of Somerset. The list of online gazetteers is growing.
The 2003 volumes of the Irish Historical Towns Atlas have been added to the towns page.
4 March
Additions to the page on farm buildings.
21 February
The article on medieval hospitals which first appeared in the November issue of Medieval History is now online: Heritage of Mercy.
6 February
The National Library of Scotland's online maps of Scotland now include the Blaeu Atlas of Scotland, 1654, with text here translated into English for the first time.
27 January
The Glamorgan Record Office holds a series of 40, 000 building regulation plans for Cardiff. A Heritage Lottery Fund grant has made possible the creation of an online catalogue at Cardiff: The building of a capital.
21 January
Added Part IV: Pleasure Gardens of Old London of Henry C. Shelley, Inns and Taverns of Old London.
18 January
Added Part III: Clubs of Old London of Henry C. Shelley, Inns and Taverns of Old London.
12 January
The images added for the coffee-houses section of Henry C. Shelley, Inns and Taverns of Old London.
9 January
The remainder of the images added for the inns and taverns section of Henry C. Shelley, Inns and Taverns of Old London.
6 January
Added the first half of Henry C. Shelley, Inns and Taverns of Old London (1909), covering inns, taverns and coffee-houses. I am gradually adding the original images.
2003
15 December
Link added to Historic Herefordshire On Line - the richly informative website for Herefordshire Sites and Monuments Record.
19 November
An introduction to deeds added, first published in Living History October 2003.
19 October
The National Register of Archives will close at Quality Court, Chancery Lane, London on 7 November 2003. On 8 December 2003 the service will reopen at the National Archives building at Kew.
8 October
Archives Network Wales went live in September. It aims to provide an online searchable catalogue of collections held by record offices and other repositories in Wales. 500 collections are currently covered; by December 2005 this will be 4,000+.
The Society of Antiquaries of Scotland has just made its publications archive available online through the Archaeology Data Service. The digital archive includes out of print monographs, Archaeologia Scotica (1792-1890) and Proceedings (1851-1999) - the primary journal for architectural history in Scotland.
21 September
The British Library has begun making available online images from its huge collection of topographical drawings. The aim is to provide a sketchbook tour of England between 1750 and 1850 featuring drawings by Samuel Grimm and later artists such as George Scharf. A special exhibition features Grimm's Northumberland Sketchbooks.
4 September
SBH is now plugged into the National Grid for Learning.
Links added to The English Lake District - A Living Landscape and to The Harleian Society.
10 August
A little added on bridge chapels. [Now to be found on the bridges page.]
16 July
The introduction to Edwardian architecture has been expanded.
11 July
The introduction to cathedrals has been expanded.
20 June
A page added on hunting, gate, park and Masonic lodges. Links added to online facsimiles of four Georgian pattern books and John Speed's atlas of 1610 (maps), and the full text of Anglo-Saxon charters (early sources).
11 June
The Tate Gallery has launched a comprehensive online catalogue of Turner's works at Turner Worldwide. Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851) made tours through England, Scotland and Wales from 1792, sketching buildings and scenery.
5 June
Additions to university libraries.
22 May
Collect Britain is the British Library's new website with images and sounds from its collections. Links to those collections online now have been added to the pages on maps and image indexes. Many more will come online between now and summer 2004.
5 May
Over the last few days I have added a little something on urban churches, and scattered a few new links and book titles about the place.
18 April
Brief introduction to Edwardian style added.
16-7 April
A page added on market halls. More on music halls and cinemas added to places of entertainment. Additions to university libraries, manors and monasteries.
12-3 April
An introduction added to places of entertainment. A page added on Victorian architecture. Additions and revisions to some other pages, including Georgian and Factories.
The Public Record Office has a new name. On 2 April it amalgamated with the Historical Manuscripts Commission to become The National Archives.
5 April
Some revision of the pages on the Church of Scotland, Scottish archives, and Churches.
3 April
A page added on Gothic Revival.
28-9 March
The University of Dundee has created a virtual archive of Scottish architectural plans and drawings at The Drawn Evidence. The database has over 10,000 images and accompanying descriptions.
A page added on manors and an introduction to Grand houses. Links added to Image Indexes.
23 March
Defoe's tour continues to Somerset, Devon and Cornwall. The Defoe files have been renamed for clarity. My apologies to anyone who had bookmarked one. That ends my trip with Defoe.
Bill Thayer, best known for his huge online collection of material on Roman monuments, has been branching out into the medieval period. He has made available online sections of Richard John King, Handbook to the Cathedrals of England (1862). Link added on the Cathedrals page.
The 19th-century church plans of the Incorporated Church Building Society are now online at Church Plans Online. The archive covers England and Wales. The Digital Library of Historical Directories is creating a digital library of eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth century local and trade directories from England and Wales. These are two of the 150 digital projects supported by Lottery funding under the theme Enrich UK. Others include some local history projects.
22 March
Defoe's tour continues to Wiltshire (with a bit more of Hampshire) and Dorset.
13 March
Since Defoe's tour has proved popular, more has been added - covering Hampton Court and Hampshire. Primary sources now have their own section too. My apologies to anyone who had bookmarked Defoe or Gerald of Wales in their first positions.
10 March
At the suggestion of Geoff Evans, a page added on sources for banks. I must also thank him for some additions to the list of inventories by the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historic Monuments of Wales.
New 9 March
Daniel Defoe's Tour Through the Eastern Counties of England (1722) added. It covers Essex (including what is now NE London), Suffolk, Norfolk and Cambridgeshire, describing towns and country houses, with a dollop of gossip along the way.
7 March
A brief outline of monasticism added to the monasteries page.
5 March
Updates to several pages, particularly Image Indexes.
2 March
The texts by the 12th-century Gerald of Wales added: Description of Wales and Itinerary Through Wales.
1 March
A list of the official inventories by the various Royal Commissions added. A few more links added and the rest checked.
24 February
The section on later maps has been expanded.
20 February
Search tips have returned to the search page.
14 February
Castles and town walls are now covered on separate pages. Added a link to an online collection of drawings by William Green (1907-83) of historic buildings mainly in the West Midlands, including many timber-framed houses.
13 February
Continuing the drive to improve the usability of SBH. Clicking on a link to a page outside the site now brings the page up in a new browser window. Some text has been rearranged and/or expanded to aid clarity.
11 February
A page on Chinoiserie added to the style section.
3 February
A small improvement to the navigation of SBH. Previously when you clicked on a link in the top menu, a new side menu appeared. That still happens, but now the first page of the section also appears.
29 January
Pages added introducing the Stuart, Baroque and Georgian styles.
28 January
A new page created, reproducing the English Heritage guidelines for creating reports for Conservation-Based Research and Analysis (CoBRA): reports.
17 January
As noted in the introduction to Archives, The Manorial Documents Register for Norfolk is now online - joining Wales, Hampshire, the Isle of Wight, Norfolk and the three Ridings of Yorkshire.
2002
13 December
Another page added to the style guide - Scottish Baronial. An introduction added to the castles page.
27 November
Additions to the Mills page: The Mills Archive has been created to house the SPAB Mills section collection, and private collections related to mills. The complete Great Western Railway archive has now been received by the Wiltshire and Swindon Record Office, including drawings by Isambard Kingdom Brunel.
23 November
SBH moved from the swinternet server to its new address. Another section added to the style guide - Tudor and Elizabethan.
13 September
At last another section of the style guide - Gothic.
25 August
Added an outline history of the development of shops and links to Samantha Letters, Gazetteer of Markets and Fairs in England and Wales to 1516. Other links checked.
5 August
New links added. Thanks to Sonja Cameron for suggesting the additional links to dictionaries and drawing my attention to Medieval Palaeography: An introduction. Those familiar with the Archaeology Data Service might like to try its new portal HEIRPORT which permits combined or separate searches of several national heritage databases.
20 July
PADDI - An online bibliographic database on all aspects of the built environment in Ireland, north and south, was launched last month - a useful addition to the bibliographies page.
A selection of images from Magalotti added.
5 July
A morsel on context added to the starters. The list of 17th-century images from Magalotti revised.
23 June
I have added a page on the Church in Scotland.
21 June
I have begun a style guide, for those of you who keep searching in vain for one. I hope you are not too impatient though. It may take a while to finish.
I don't go chasing awards, but I confess I do read the reviews of this web-site. Now you can too.
22 May 2002
Yes SBH has a new look.
I have also expanded the coverage of settlement. After all, most buildings are in cities, towns or villages.
The old page of gazetteers by building type has gone; those references have been moved to the relevant page in Building Types.