Inside Tallis: Reconstructing the Interiors of Tallis’s London Street Views

Abstract

This paper will examine how the physical reality behind Tallis’s illustrations can be illuminated to explore the commercial, domestic and social dimensions of Tallis’s London. It will explore the range of material culture available, and how this can be used to analyse interior space, in particular through English Heritage’s Architectural Study Collection. Two preliminary case studies will investigate the future potential for looking behind the façades of early Victorian London.

Keywords:

• London
• townhouse
• Tallis
• archaeology
• wallpaper
• historic interiors

Notes

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2. Sarah Tallow, The Archaeology of Improvement 1750–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 90–91. Examples of notable exceptions include Tallow, Archaeology of Improvement, and Rosemary Sweet, The English Town 1680–1840: Government, Society and Culture (Harlow: Longman, 1999).

3. Charlotte Newman, ‘A Mansion for the Mad: An Archaeology of Brooke House, Hackney’, Post-Medieval Archaeology, 49 (2015), 131–55; Matthew Jenkins and Charlotte J. Newman, ‘London in pieces: a biography of a lost London streetscape’, in InHabit, ed. by Antony Buxton (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2017).

4. Nigel Jeffries, Alastair Owens, Dan Hicks, Rupert Featherby and Karen Wehner, ‘Rematerializing Metropolitan Histories? People, Places and Things in Modern London’, in Crossing Paths or Sharing Tracks: Future Directions in the Archaeological Study of Post–1550 Britain and Ireland ed. by Audrey Horning and Marilyn Palmer (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2009), pp. 323–50.

5. Jeffries et al., ‘Rematerializing Metropolitan Histories?’, p. 328.

6. See, for example, Alastair Owens and Nigel Jeffries, ‘People and Things on the Move: Domestic Material Culture, Poverty and Mobility in Victorian London’, International Journal of Historical Archaeology, 20.4 (December 2016), 804–27.

7. Tim Meldrum, Domestic Service and Gender 1660–1750: Life and Work in the London Household (Harlow: Longman, 2000), pp. 77–78; for examples of the range of buildings archaeology see Pamela C. Graves, ‘Social Space in the English Medieval Parish Church’, Economy and Society, 18.3 (August 1989), 297–322; Roberta Gilchrist, Gender and Material Culture: The Archaeology of Religious Women (London: Routledge, 1997); Kate Giles and Melanie Giles, ‘The Writing on the Wall: The Concealed Communities of the East Yorkshire Horselads’, International Journal of Historical Archaeology, 11.4 (December 2007), 336–57; Nathaniel W. Alcock, People at Home: Living in a Warwickshire Village, 1500–1800 (Chichester: Phillimore, 1993); Paul Graves-Brown and John Schofield, ‘The Filth and the Fury: 6 Denmark Street (London) and the Sex Pistols’, Antiquity 85.330 (November 2011), 1385–401.

8. For discussions of the development of the discipline see Kate Giles, ‘Buildings archaeology’, in Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology, ed. by Claire Smith (New York: Springer, 2007), pp. 1033–41; Dan Hicks and Audrey Horning, ‘Historical Archaeology and Buildings’, in The Cambridge Companion to Historical Archaeology, ed. by Dan Hicks and Mary C. Beaudry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 273–92. For discussion of structuration theory see John C. Barrett, Fragments From Antiquity: An Archaeology of Social Life in Britain, 2900–1200 BC (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994); Kate Giles, An Archaeology of Social Identity: Guildhalls in York c.1350–1630. British Archaeological Reports British Series 315 (Oxford: British Archaeological Reports, 2000).

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10. Harold Mytum, ‘Ways of Writing in Post-medieval and Historical Archaeology: Introducing Biography’, Post-Medieval Archaeology, 44.2 (2010), 237–54; Gavin Lucas, ‘Historical Archaeology and Time’, in The Cambridge Companion to Historical Archaeology, pp. 34–47.

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12. Hicks, ‘From “Questions that Count”’, p. 939.

13. Jackson, London Street Views, pp. 54–55.

14. Kathryn A. Morrison, English Shops and Shopping (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003).

15. Morrison, English Shops.

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17. Architectural Study Collection (Wrest Park, Bedfordshire), accession number 88082208.1–8.

18. See publications by the Wallpaper History Society for numerous examples.

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25. England and Wales Census 1851 and 1861.

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34. Jenkins and Newman, ‘London in pieces’; Matthew Jenkins, ‘The View from the Street: the Landscape of Polite Shopping in Georgian York’, Urban History (forthcoming).

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36. See the analysis of Tilney Street, Mayfair (Jenkins and Newman, ‘London in pieces’).

37. Jon Stobart, Spend, Spend, Spend! A History of Shopping (Stroud: The History Press, 2008), p. 102.

38. Morrison, English Shops, pp. 92–108, 125–43.

39. Morrison, English Shops, p. 67.

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41. Stobart et al., Spaces of Consumption, p. 126.

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43. Kelley Graham, Gone to the Shops: Shopping in Victorian England (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2008), p. 6.

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46. WA FT/0391/41; Evans, The Old Snuff House, pp. 28–32.

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51. LMA CLC/B/192/F/001/MS11936/510/1049444.

52. Jenkins, ‘Housing and Shopping in York’.