A survey of the early town directories in key British towns and cities in the 1770s and 1780s. These were pioneering information systems, publicly available, designed to help people orient themselves in the expanding towns.

This paper was given in Section S07 “Inter-city Competition in Global Urban History (Middle Ages – Early Modern Period)” of the 13th International Conference on Urban History, Helsinki, 25. August 2016. Between 1760 and 1820, English town directories became a particularly important medium for the representation of urban landscapes. Apart from listing inhabitants and tradespeople in order to fos-ter communication between them and to help strangers navigate through the town, most directories also include a so-called “history” or “account” of the town. Both, it can be argued, were an important means of engaging in inter-city competition. Whereas the original purpose and nature of directories was a simple collection of names and useful information, meant to help the visitor and tradesman, they soon began to incorporate ele-ments of the travel guide and the urban histories. With regard to the latter, Rosemary Sweet has already shown that they were essential in shaping urban identity and heavily relied on comparisons with other towns. So far, it has been mainly overlooked that this also applies to 18th- and early 19th-century directories: Their descriptions of the urban landscape are not purely factual but tend to eval-uate a town and its components in terms of an ideal urbanity, comparing it with other towns and cities throughout the kingdom. Apart from this, it can be argued that such a comparison also hap-pens in a less explicit fashion: Simply by publishing a directory, an editor lays claim to a certain de-gree of urbanity of his town and, thus, to membership in the circle of the “modern” cities that were characterised by the ideals of the English urban renaissance. Analysing such strategies of comparison also reveals that competition between towns was by no means focused on London alone. Rather, directories enabled inhabitants and visitors to locate themselves and the town on a national scale of urban achievement and culture that was not strictly hierarchical.

In the view of Professor Harold Carter directories provide, given due care by scholars, a resource of 'inestimable value for the consideration of urban character'. In London they represent an extraordinarily large and varied database, with an annually updated edition or sometimes several titles and editions each year since the mid eighteenth century. At the very least this presents the opportunity of cross-checking and complementing other archival and printed sources such as taxation records, poll books, rate books and the population census.

In 1933 Charles Goss published his classic text The London Directories 1677-1855: a Bibliography with Notes on Their Origin and Development, Dennis Archer, London. This book has served as an invaluable guide for two generations of those local historians interested in particular editions of the many series of directories published in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The fifty years or so which have elapsed since Goss’s work have, however, revealed certain inaccuracies in the text, and many new volumes have come to light of which he was unaware. The time has now come for a reassessment of London directories as historical raw material and for a new listing of editions and their whereabouts.1 The main gap to fill is the period after 1855 which was ignored by Goss. His reasoning for using this terminal date was that Frederic Kelly had seen off the last major rival to his Post Office London Directory, F.W. Watkins, in 1855, and that there were few major changes in the directory world thereafter. This was a short sighted view because, although the Post Office London Directory continued to hold sway in the field of general all-purpose directories, there were many important and interesting developments in specialist and local suburban publications.

Malgré le fait que les archives publiques locales constituent une ressource importante pour les chercheurs de plusieurs disciplines, bien peu d'efforts sont faits pour garantir à la fois la préservation et l'utilisation présente et future de ces documents. Si cette lacune n'est pas comblée dans un avenir rapproché, les documents produits localement deviendront une ressource perdue. La confiance traditionnellement accordée aux archivistes pour le soin et la préservation de ces documents pose problème, étant donné les difficultés qui assaillent actuellement cette profession. Il faut plutôt recourir à des interventions de nature interdisciplinaire pour faire face à la crise des archives gouvernementales locales. Dans l'espoir d'en susciter d'autres, ce texte relate une de ces initiatives. Le «Vancouver Island Project» vise à faire un inventaire systématique de toutes les archives publiques locales existant sur l'Ile de Vancouver. Quant cette étape sera compl...