Historical directories: Street View for time-travellers – Spectator Blogs

Fancy a walk into London’s past? How about a stroll down Fleet Street in 1895? Or Oxford Street in 1899? It can be done. I can’t promise pictures, but I can offer more detail on the residents of each building than Google would risk publishing today.

The secret: from the mid-1830s, a man named Frederic Kelly employed agents to call at every address in London and to record the people or businesses within. Kelly was a postal official, and his agents, at least to begin with, were postmen. There was some scandal about that. Because this wasn’t an official census, conducted every ten years and then locked away for a century; this was a commercial operation, conducted annually and sold in a big fat book, the Post Office London Directory. It listed the names alphabetically, like a phone book today; classified by trade and profession, like a Yellow Pages; but also simply street by street.