History of English Places

The History of English Places is a map-based app for discovering the rich history of places in England. Information is drawn from the Topographical Dictionary of England (Lewis, 1848) and the place-by-place histories of the Victoria County History (VCH), published between 1901 and the present day.

In the free version you can navigate the historical first-ever edition of the Ordnance Survey map and use the location pins to explore the 13,713 short nineteenth-century descriptions of England’s villages, towns and cities.

A monthly or annual subscription is available that allows access to detailed entries on taken from 175 volumes of histories produced by the Victoria County History project. For the first time, you can explore the rich, detailed histories produced by the VCH in their geographical context, and discover the past of places around you when you’re out and about. Over time more material will be added from the existing volumes as well as including material from new VCH volumes. The app can recognise your location and show the histories of places near you.

Whether you’re interested in family history, house history, local history, or learning more about historic places as a visitor, the English Places app can help and inform. VCH histories range from the earliest times to the present day, and are trusted by historians, heritage practitioners, archaeologists and others as the highest-quality scholarly information on England’s historic places.

The descriptions of places are presented according to historic place-names, or the names of parishes (the historic English settlement / administrative unit, organised around a local parish church). The map uses a version of the first-edition 6 inch to the mile Ordnance Survey map as a base. You can navigate the map, or alternatively complete a simple text search, or filter the list of 13,713 entries by county, by size of place, or by whether there is a VCH history available. 

The app can track your location to present the 10 nearest entries. You can bookmark your favourite places and filter the main list to produce your own list of bookmarked entries.

Every place in England has an entry in the app, with detailed VCH accounts for many places. The VCH is an ongoing, growing project, with histories written over the last 120 years, and more in progress. 

The History of English Place is one of the Institute of Historical Research projects exploring digital mapping and public history.

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About the Victoria County History

The Victoria County History (VCH) is an ongoing national project to write the history of every county in England, from the earliest times to the present. The project was founded in 1899 and dedicated to Queen Victoria, which is how it derives its name.

The VCH is an ongoing project and as such not every place in England has been researched and its history published by the VCH. The VCH is committed to completing the project and would welcome proposals to begin work in areas where there is little or no VCH coverage. More VCH histories are being published every year!

The VCH is a research project in Institute of Historical Research, part of the University of London, today forming part of the Centre for the History of People, Place and Community.

https://www.history.ac.uk/research/victoria-county-history

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