Holdens directories of London in 1805 and 1811

I have a number of pages listing most of the publicans, licensees,wine & brandy merchants of London according to the Holdens directories of 1805 and 1811.

These were achieved by literally working through each directory, and transcribing manually the entries I felt worth recording.

There are a few entries which are not relevant to pub history, but the majority are good.

Once these have been added to the site, as they have been, I slowly work through the many pages, and add links to the relevant pub if it exists, and also the relevant detail to the specific pub in question.

This all takes time. It is very labour intensive; and in some cases can be extremely boring.

A major plus point in doing this has been my addition of the London 1832 Robsons street directory. This directory does not cover ever part of London, but where it is listed and added, it is brilliant. The 1842 Robsons directory is mainly added to many of these pages, which is good.

I will not continue with other examples, but these two are keeping me busy.

Mourning Bush Tavern etc

I suffer with a belief in whether the pages I add to the sites are of any use to anyone. I guess I am just a bit knackered.

The good news is I had an inspiration today, I spotted an anomaly (error), on one of the pages which led me to finding a rather excellent 1830 book on the New Post office in St Martin-le-Grand; and the Mourning Bush Tavern.

This book transcription is now listed on a couple of my pages. It adds to the history of both St Martin le Grand, but also mentions the London Wall in a couple of places.

There is quite a long account of the Ancient Mourning Bush Tavern, in Aldersgate; well, it is half the book, and from a perspective as written in 1830, but could easily have been 1930.

This is later the Raglan Hotel, in St Annes & St Agnes.

London history & pub history

Well, I have a number of sites, as you may well know. My best site is of pub history, with about 50,000 pages – but it is not actually that good. It lists all of the pubs over a 200 year time span, excluding anything after 1944, except some modern listings.

The problems are, it does not list much which is modern – hey, ho. The older pubs are difficult to find, and even when you can find them, they are difficult to match with other pubs in the area.

What do I need to do? I probably need some form of mapping to make it easier to find these old pubs, I am less interested in the modern ones.

In fact, I have zero interest in pubs apart from their location, so this may be the clue.

My latest project is involved in looking at the London wall around Roman London. This was built around the end of the 4th century, although most sites claim it to be two hundred years earlier when the locals did not have the necessary skills to build this wall.

I have gathered together mainly Victorian archaeological evidence for the areas where this Wall existed, and with lots of examples. I have been bouncing this site around a few domain names, and I have finally settled on the london18.co.uk site (at the moment).

This site also has some rather brilliant early street directories, e.g. the 1832 and 1842 listings, I am really pleased with these.

I now need to envelope the pub history site into this site, particularly for the city of London.

I will leave it at this tonight, as I am still trying to decide how to do this; but I will do this successfully, and well.



Giving up smoking after 45 years & London pub history

Can you imagine smoking for 45 years, and all of the reciprocal effects of this on your lungs and life?

You decide that after 45 years of this life changing effect, that you can change? It is not that easy.

Then you make that effort, and stop smoking. Because your doctor shows an ounce of remorse, and offers you a way out of this life threatening illness.

You begin the newer drugs, some not so new, i.e. ventolin and sebri (a version of becotide).

You then go for a lung function test with a hospital technician, to be told that vaping is not giving up smoking, hut instead as suffering from the popcorn effects. Whatever this means.

You continue to trial the latest drugs, whilst not smoking for a number of weeks (3), so far.

That is three weeks you have not actually smoked a cigarette, no carcinogen effects, just nicotine from a vape, that is pretty damned good.

This is where I am at, and very proud of it. And I am slowly felling better for the life changes. It will take some time.

Meanwhile, I have discovered the internet archive, which is pretty bloody amazing. It incorporates my best sites, e.g. google books, and gutenberg and a whole host more, for early reference works.

London wiki & street directory & history

I continue my additions to the various sites I run. My current interest is in London history, and where I am going to visit every day shortly, when I get my 60+ London free travel pass, you have no idea how excited I am about getting this!

I have also decided that my main site will be called londonwiki.co.uk which is a brilliant name (this is currently redirecting to london18.co.uk) ; I don’t think that google ads will work on this site, which is a shame as I do spend good money on my own web server to supply all the history sites I have; but hey ho – google ads are pretty shit and annoying at the best of times!

So, tomorrow, I start to move everything to the londowiki.co.uk site. Whoopee, indeed.

London street directory & pub history

Actually, my post is not about either of my main interests. Although I score highly for both London street directory & also for pub history in google, both are about #3; I am posting for an entirely different reason tonight.

What I am referring to is relevant to brexit in the UK and England; and also to the fact that people think it makes it OK to make racist remarks to people generally whether it be in an forum on the internet, in schools and hospitals, or in the wider working place, or anywhere.

It is not acceptable to use hate speech in the UK and England. I know it appears OK to do this, as Tory campaigners think it is OK to use racist abuse, e.g. in the London Mayoral elections, or when the likes of Boris the pratt opens his mouth about the use of the hijab – calling it a letter box!!

I think if you feel this use of language is OK, continue to vote Tory or what other right wing organisation you deem acceptable, you might as well vote in another Nazi. And all this time, Jermey Corbyn is deemed anti-semitic for being against this sort of rhetoric. When will the brilliant Jewish labour speak out against all of this shite instead.

Just saying.

London 1940 street directory updates

I continue to add entries to the London 1940 street directory, this will take some time. Here are a few more for S:

I continue adding entries for all of the London site, either old pubs, or random updates.

It’s what I do.

https://london18.co.uk/streets1940S/index.shtmlhttps://london18.co.uk/streets1940S/index.shtml

London wiki & pub history

I have been busy tonight. I get fed up with sites like google telling me I cannot use a new domain name as I am creating too many new sites, maybe they are correct, but it still gets on my nerves.

So, to get round this annoying interruption, I have moved a few sites about in the last couple of hours.

Firstly, the londonwiki site is now on london18.co.uk, as is all of the street directories from london19.com and also I have just added the 1843 street directories fro my pub history site.

Whatever.

I will clarify all of this tomorrow, but that is where we are tonight.

Kevan

Broadband – Virgin v Sky

I thought I would post on something different tonight, the wonderful world of broadband & TV. I use both.

I am fortunate to be in an area which has Virgin fibre into my home, but at a cost. I spend nearly £100 a month for the privilege. Most of the TV I watch could be viewed by freeview.

Sky now offer a much cheaper deal, at less than half the price . The broadband speeds are not quite as good, but I am not always impressed with the service from Virgin, and I share a fibre cable with lots of others, if you know what I mean. Basically, their service is as good as they want it to be.

I believe I can get an almost similar package from sky for about £42 a month, and am seriously considering swapping.They suggest average speeds of 63MBs as compared with 95MBs which is what I appear to be getting (it was 87MBs earlier).

Running a sky check I appear to be able to get between 59.1 and 72.8 (if I get the fibre max deal), this will be fine.

For me tonorrow, their phone number is 0800 840 5394 ; I think I will have some of this – there is a small set-up fee.