Vanessa Harding

And this is, of course, what underlies the creation, the massive project to create

a set of chronicles, which the name Raphael Holland said is the one that has come down to history, though it was a multi-party attempt, endeavour, to produce an enormous history of Britain.

And at the same time, there is also a sort of place-based kind of history.

For example, with Camden's Britannia, with an attempt to bring in the visible past as well as the written past.

So it's not just documentary history, but it's looking at ruins, at buildings, thinking about how the country has evolved over time.

Yes, indeed.

I mean, Stowe is often referred to as nostalgic in the way he writes.

And I think it's important to remember, if he's born in 1525 and the survey is not completed until the 1590s, he's an old man looking back on a London that has changed enormously in his lifetime.

He is interested in the past.

Much of what he's doing before the completion of the survey is actually editing and publishing chronicles, summarizing them, sort of making history more popular or more accessible, both in terms of cost and in terms of length.

So he's very deeply steeped in the narrative histories of London.

He also clearly reads documents, as you were saying.

I mean, this is documentary history as we know it.

He's reading things and criticizing them.

He's looking at buildings and he's writing down some kinds of oral history or things that he's heard, things that people have told him, stories that he knows.

So Stowe's Survey of London, which is a narrative, obviously not a drawn one, not a depicted one, is an amazing summary of history as expressed in place.

So he describes London, or the main part of the survey, works its way through the wards of the City of London, street by street, in a very perambulatory way.

You know, now you have this, then on the right there is this, then on the left there is that.

and he clearly knows London very well, but he's writing at a time when it's almost the last time that anybody could have known London that well.

He's been brought up in London, he's