As Heritage Open Days 2009 draws ever closer the invitations to this year’s launch have been produced and circulated. We are looking forward to the event and pleased that the ‘open door’ used on the front of the invitation is one of our very own – the door to No. 10 Brunswick Square where The Regency Town House’s downstairs annex is located.
We now have all of the census information for Kensington Place loaded into MyHouseMyStreet. This is the first street for which we have completed the uploading of data and, to celebrate, we thought we would do some demographic analysis to help put together what Kensington Place was like at the turn of the 20th century.
The chart below shows some basic statistics about the 51 addresses that occupy Kensington Place.
We can immediately see that there was an average of 5-6 persons per address. While this may not sounds like a lot, about 25% of addresses accounted for almost 40% of all residents on Kensington Place, with some houses having as many as 10-13 individuals living under one roof!
Another general observation is that most of the people on the street were born in Sussex. Although not depicted, 10% were born in Greater London and there was a small handful of residents that had emigrated from elsewhere: Ireland, Scotland, Germany, Italy, and the United States.
The range of occupations indicate that Kensington Place was very much a working class street. Absent were doctors, barristers, or senior public officials. Many of the street’s early residents were active in service trades: dressmaking, millinery, servants, and railway clerks.
We will post more demographic information as it becomes available from the other streets in the project (Foundry Street, Gloucester Road, Pelham Square) in order to help bring to life the North Laine and its streets.
Brighton & Hove Open Door 2009 is our largest festival yet. While going through archives at the Town House, we discovered a copy of our 2004 Flier, pictured below. In 2004, there were 40 events overall. In 2009, we are staging over 155 events, a 280% increase in just five short years! This is amazing growth.
As of today, all events for Brighton & Hove Open Door are now listed online at our events page. There are also listings for the Open Door events for all of the MyHouseMyStreet streets: Foundry Street, Gloucester Road, Kensington Place, and Pelham Square.
Census documents represent an entirely new challenge. Unlike the Directories which are very easy to read, 19th Century census documents are written records that contain old-fashioned handwriting. Since there were many different census workers collecting/processing the information we are exposed to all sorts of different styling of writing, from legible to indecipherable.
Because of the variances in handwriting, it takes awhile to get acquainted with the subtleties of an individual’s ‘scrawl’. At times, the poorest of the hand written documents seem like a hopeless effort but we have found that the more pages that you look through, the more you become conditioned to the writing, and that there is benefit to saving the difficult documents to the end of the process; to take advantage of what you have learned. We have now learn how to read even the worst of writing.
There are some very useful guides published to advise about reading old text and it’s worth looking them up. Perhaps some of the best resources we will soon have though are our volunteers themselves who, by the nature of their involvement, will be able to consider themselves gifted readers of classic Victorian handwriting!
Today, we started to open the directory graphics we shot the other day and to type the content of the pages into the MHMS system’s Excel spreadsheets. This entry is going to expand on this part of the work cycle (noted as 5, in the entry above).
The method we use for transferring the text content of the directory pages into digital format is as follows. Dave, one of our IT specialists, has made a set of Excel spreadsheets that mimic the sort of historical documents we are handling – so, when we are working with directories, we open the ‘directory’ spreadsheet, enter the year of publication, directory and publisher names into the top fields of the sheet and then type the content of the directory page into the body of the Excel doc. It’s easy to understand what goes where, given the attention to detail that’s gone into the design of the spreadsheets – our ‘System Documents’.
In a single day’s work, about 15-20 directories can be processed by the average volunteer, so it’s about a weeks work for an individual to process the information for a small street, like Pelham. We usually work in small groups, often sitting next to one another and working with consecutive directories. This makes the whole process of transcription more sociable, sometimes lets us cross check data with one another and, of course, it cuts down on the calendar days taken – same number of man days though!
The Directory challenge is nearing an end and we’ve nearly got all the required photos. Now it’s time to start on the Census documents. We will be working with the Census records for 1841, 1851, 1861, 1871, 1881, 1891 and 1901. These records seem to amount to things called ‘enumerators records’, a sort of condensed set of documents made after the collection of the raw data at the end of each Census event.
Today a group of four volunteers from the Town House have gone down to the Brighton Local History Centre to identify and photograph the street directory pages for Pelham Square and Kensington Place.
To put it in the simplest terms possible, the process for collecting directory information for MHMS is: (1) Choose a street and the years to be researched (2) Retrieve the directories from the library shelves (3) Take photos of pages containing the entries for the street that is being researched (4) Load and organise the photos onto a computer (5) Read the image files and type the lines of text data into our special Microsoft Excel documents.
This may seem like an involved process but it really is rather simple.
For illustrative purposes, let’s focus on Pelham Square. The Square was first developed in the mid-19th century, so it has been around for approximately the last 160 years. We make use of published directories dated up to 1975, which means that there are potentially 125 years of directories that must be reviewed. However, an analysis of the Brighton History Centre’s Directory holdings reveals that they have publications for approximately 90 of these years. Pelham Square has historically had around 25 properties associated with it, and it is a reasonable assumption that these addresses will usually be covered on a single page in a directory.
Therefore, to complete Pelham Square, we will need to find and open 90 different directories and take photographs of approximately 90 pages. We use a stout tripod and time delayed exposures to get decent photos in the relatively low light conditions found in the History Centre. The camera itself is very ordinary, an old 3Mb nikon set to ‘fine’ quality, so that the .jpg images we take are a couple of thousand pixels wide. We have found that using high-resolution images makes the text easier to read when using the images for screen-based research. However, the trade-off is that the file sizes are a bit larger (2-3MB).
One thing that is key to success is organisation. We have found that creating a detailed checklist is an important way to ensure that the status for all the directories can be checked – have we taken them off the shelf, photographed them, etc.. Naming the image files something meaningful is also beneficial. By creating a convention for naming files, the file names can then become a useful way to determine what year and directory are contained in the image. For instance, a photo of a page from an 1859 Pages Directory for Pelham Square may be named by the camera as DSCN8819.jpg but we would rename the file to a meaningful name such as 1859PagesPSq.jpg.
From our experience of processing the Pelham Square directories, we have found that it takes three or four people a day or two to open, document, and photograph the required material. For a longer street with 40-50 houses, such as Kensington Place, the process takes two to three days.
There are two sources of information that we have chosen to utilize in the MHMS project: Street & Trade Directories and Census Documents. Below we provide a little information about each.
The Census is a national initiative to collect demographic information for the entire country. The results are relatively reliable and the information collected is consistent across regional areas. The Census goes into some depth about individuals, offering us information about items such as age, gender, and occupation.
The Street & Trade directories do not go into this level of detail and usually provide little more than a company’s or individual’s name and address. Furthermore, unlike the Census, Directories do not conform to a national template. There was no single, de facto, publisher of Directory listings but, rather, many competing against each other; generally producing output on an annual basis to identify businesses and individuals in a local area. As a result, listings varying in quality, both in terms of their area-coverage and their information content. What’s more, there are occasionally multiple publishers within a single year.
We could have chosen to use additional records within the MHMS project, such as tax documents and electoral lists, but Census information and street and trade Directories are readily available, easily processed, and provide an excellent starting point for discovering who actually lived in a property – in distinction to ownership issues, etc..
It’s going to take a lot of work to design and launch the MyHouseMyStreet project and, almost all of it, will be undertaken by volunteers. We are very fortunate in having been able to attract a team with a very diverse set of skills but also with a shared interest: a passion for Brighton & Hove and its cultural heritage.
One major component of the MyHouseMyStreet project is the deployment of the website. To achieve this we have developers, data managers, and network administrators whose passion is to build a great looking website that runs smoothly. At the heart of the project, of course, is also the data that is collected about each street. To deal with this work, we have a small and resourceful army of volunteers, many of whom also have specialist skills.
We look forward to introducing ourselves as the project unfolds.
Last year, we had great success with our Foundry Street project. However, we are a little more ambitious this year.
In addition to Foundry Street (which we are revisiting and enhancing with additional information for 2009) we are aiming to throw a little light onto Kensington Place, Pelham Square, and Gloucester Road. This is an amazing set of locations that appropriately add to the Foundry Street legacy. These streets are adjacent to Foundry Street, which will allow us to start piecing together the story of an entire neighbourhood. We are excited to scale up our research by adding these new streets to the MHMS project. Stay tuned as we post information about each location in the weeks ahead.
Our heritage events are all about a ‘sense of place’. Therefore, the first step in staging an event is to identify those places that are of general interest and then collect the information needed to tell a compelling story of the street’s history.
The Foundry Street Event was located in Brighton’s historic North Laine area, an industrial zone for Georgian/Victorian Brighton. We have agreed with Peter Crowhurst, the Chair of the North Laine Community Association that, for 2009, we will maintain our focus on North Laine streets, as we develop our early MHMS work.
As a North Laine resident, Peter has a genuine interest in contributing to the research efforts and plans to collect information about Kensington Place and encourage other North Laine property owners to open their homes for public tours during the Brighton & Hove Open Door celebration. These tours will complement MHMS exhibitions, allowing event visitors to actually see inside the houses on which we hang posters. Visiting a small four to six-room house that had 17 occupants listed in the mid-Nineteenth century census really does help illuminate the living conditions of that period!
As with so many things in life, MyHouseMyStreet (MHMS) is part of a larger whole. MHMS sits within Brighton & Hove Open Door (BHOD), which is itself a part of the UK’s national celebration known as Heritage Open Days (HODs). This event is, in turn, a part of the continent-wide European Heritage Days (EHDs).
This is certainly a lot of acronyms but the key point to remember is that all of these events aim to provide a once-a-year chance to discover hidden architectural treasures and enjoy a wide range of tours, events and activities which bring to life local history and culture.
In keeping with the Heritage Open Days ethos, all Brighton & Hove Open Days events are offered free of charge and the range of activities staged is designed to provide a program for everyone, whatever their background, age and ability.
The MyHouseMyStreet project is perhaps unique to the Heritage Open Days initiative in being an individual event that has spawned its own companion website. We feel that the MHMS project adds an overall completeness to the HODs experience, raising the profile of the nation’s smaller historic properties and offering a unique online resource to facilitate their interpretation.
The Foundry Street Event (TFSE), staged during Brighton & Hove Open Door 2008 (BHOD 08), introduced visitors to the history of Foundry Street and those who lived there between the 1820s and the 1970s, by displaying posters listing the street’s residents and the jobs they did. The event was very well received and numerous requests were made for similar events to be staged in other streets during subsequent BHODs.
As the organizers of Brighton & Hove Open Door, we have decided to respond to this request by planning a series of similar events for BHOD 09. Rather than label these with individual titles we have decided to adopt an overarching project name, MyHouseMyStreet, and to use individual street names as a suffix to this when referencing a particular event. Thus, a MyHouseMyStreet project would become, for example: MyHouseMyStreet-Boundary Lane or MyHouseMyStreet-North Road.
To assist with the preparation of the new events and to provide a permanent access point to the materials gathered, we are developing a MyHouseMyStreet website and this blog.
The website is an evolution of a project started last year for The Foundry Street Event. The new site provides a much more coherent and robust presence and one capable of automating the compilation of historic materials. We will be testing and further developing the new site over time, with the aim of eventually creating a resource that is capable of assisting multiple users in multiple locations to document their local street history.
It is intended that the blog will capture the development history of the new ’street’ projects and the online services that support them.
