John Strype's Survey of London Online
This is a full-text electronic version of John Strype's enormous two-volume survey of 1720, complete with its celebrated maps and plates, which depict the prominent buildings, street plans and ward boundaries of the late Stuart capital.
Contents
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Description
This resource is a fully searchable electronic edition of John Strype's Survey of London. Published in 1720, the Survey is an expanded two-volume edition of a book originally published by John Stow in 1598. Strype brought Stow's original account of the city into the early 18th century, with copious information about the city, its fabric, customs, monuments, charities and institutions, and added large amounts of pre-17th-century material not used by Stow. Strype also extended the range of the Survey geographically, to take in the city's new sprawling suburbs, and thematically, covering a range of new subjects such as the Great Fire, public health, workhouses and the Bank of England. He also included more than 70 large illustrations of significant buildings and a collection of detailed parish and ward maps.
Much of the Survey is divided into individual accounts of the wards and parishes of the City of London and its suburbs, with detailed descriptions of parish churches, monuments, guilds and charities.
Strengths and weaknesses
This is a comprehensive transcription of a single publication, but a publication which was itself a melange of previous editions and new material. It has all the strengths and weaknesses of Strype's original publication, which reflects his own wide-ranging interests, intellectual agendas and diverse sources. Careful reading of the marginal comments is necessary in order to determine whether the text is from the original edition by John Stow, subsequent editions of the Survey, or provided by Strype himself. See the Editor's introduction for further information.
Technical Methods
The text was manually transcribed and marked up in TEI-compliant XML.
About the project
The digital edition of John Strype's Survey of London was produced by the Stuart London project at the The Digital Humanities Institute, University of Sheffield. Funding was provided by The Leverhulme Trust and the University of Sheffield. The General Editor of the edition was Dr Julia Merritt (University of Nottingham). Technical Implementation was by the Digital Humanities Institute. For further information, see the project's About this project page.
Contact
Source Types
- Local records
- Books, pamphlets and printed ephemera
- Maps/Images
Access
- Free
Time Period
1598-1720
Publisher
The Digital Humanities Institute