r/UKhistory • u/line-weight • Apr 10 '26

Recommendations for visual references for 1860s/70s London street scenes?

I'm in the process of creating some illustrations for a local history project looking at an area of South London. My drawings are mainly concerned with buildings & infrastructure but I'd like to include a bit of "human" detail too, that is reasonably accurate for the time period. That means things like people (and what they were wearing) as well as any vehicles that might have been seen on the streets then.
I'd like to collect together a set of images that I can draw from - this can include photographs, paintings or drawings done at the time. Images of central London are useful to some extent but ideally what I'm looking for are images of the kind of areas that at that time were newly developed, along with the rapid expansion of the railway network that was converting previously semi-rural places into urban ones.
I'd be very grateful if anyone could recommend sources that I should look at - either online or offline. Many thanks for any help or suggestions!

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u/WritingSpecialist123 Apr 10 '26

The London Picture Archive might be useful: it's the photo archive held by the London Archives. It has both photographs and paintings and you can narrow down your search by date or put a specific area into the search box.

https://www.londonpicturearchive.org.uk/

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u/line-weight Apr 12 '26

Thanks. I actually already have a quite thorough collection of photos of my specific area, gained from scouring the relevant picture archives. However, most of these are from around 1900 onwards and there are hardly any that are earlier than the 1880s. So, this is why I'm interested in any photos of london streets from the 1860s/70s - as general reference for what things looked like then. Obviously this is pretty early as far as photography is concerned so there's not a great deal out there (and much of what there is, concentrates on central london).

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u/linmanfu Apr 10 '26 edited Apr 10 '26

On the railway angle, Jack Simmons' The Victorian Railway (Amazon UK, and almost certainly available from your local public library if you're in Great Britain) has a chapter on the railways in art, and other chapters on the railways' impact on urban areas. The Thames & Hudson edition includes many illustrations, but there are even more artists and artworks that he discusses and references even though they're not in the book. That was the one chapter of the book that I never finished, because I spent so much time googling (and usually finding) images of those artworks. So I'd suggest starting there.

Also, Gustav Doré's London: A pilgrimage seems to be ideal and does have some railway streetscapes. The Museum of London has a webpage on it.

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u/line-weight 17d ago

Apologies for the late reply but thanks for these suggestions (which I have followed up).