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.

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.

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!

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 Dave, one of our IT specialists, has made a set of Excel spreadsheets that mimic the sort of historical documents we are handling – so, when we are working with directories, we open the ‘directory’ spreadsheet, enter the year of publication, directory and publisher names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!

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.

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..

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.