While arrears in the poor rate was a distinctive feature of Westminster and London’s more immediate suburban parishes in the first half of the seventeenth century, it has not been discussed in great detail by historians. This article shows that it was a worsening problem exacerbated by plague. Understanding the rate problem helps elucidate the growth of urban inequality and the resultant variegated perceptions of belonging and communal obligations in London’s suburbs. The article explores the dimensions of the problem and the response of parish vestries to rate refusal, which includes the ways in which plague and poverty intersected. Problems with the collection of rates impacted the available resources of parishes to manage the poor and plague, which influenced hardening perceptions of belonging. The article also considers the increasing preoccupation of suburban vestries with those taking accommodation in the parish without recognised residency and the landlords who provided that accommodation.

‘Three British Mosques’ was co-curated by Shahed Saleem, Christopher Turner, and Ella Kilgallon and exhibited at the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Pavilion of Applied Arts at the Venice Biennale 2021. The exhibition took three of London’s mosques, each created through the adapted reuse of existing buildings, and re-created 1:1 replicas of architectural elements from each building for display. Lidar digital scans of each building were also displayed alongside filmed interviews with mosque attendees. The adapted mosques were a semi-detached pair of Edwardian houses, a Victorian public house, and a Georgian church then synagogue. The mosques overlayed Islamic architecture and design onto the existing London buildings, resulting in complex cross-cultural architectural palimpsests. This article considers how this exhibition can be understood within the historical context of displaying Islamic architecture in European museums and galleries. We argue that ‘Three British Mosques’ subverted this art history by challenging orientalised and stereotyped representations of Muslim interior spaces, characteristic of the display of Islam in European institutions, by presenting instead the quotidian and intimate details of everyday Muslim life. In this way, this article demonstrates that the exhibition asked the viewer to see Muslim life and experience in London as complex, nuanced, and negotiated.

This article illustrates how historical cartographic sources can be analysed using a Geographical Information System to identify green spaces in London with a bombsite genesis in order to enhance the understanding of how the Blitz acted as a catalyst for greening the capital. It describes how temporary wartime green space creation and a desire to memorialise using parks and gardens gave way to ambitious plans to weave hundreds of acres of new green space into London’s urban fabric after the Second World War. The policies of London’s local government show how bomb-damaged land was specifically earmarked as the nuclei around which new green spaces could be assembled to address long-standing deficiencies in open space provision. The analysis of post-war green spaces in the present-day London Borough of Southwark using a Geographical Information System, alongside case studies of Leathermarket Gardens and Burgess Park, illustrates how digital mapping combined with archival research can reveal the processes and policies used by the municipal authorities to assemble new green spaces.

In 1899, one of Charles Booth's investigators, George Arkell, visited Deptford to revise the classifications provided on Booth's Descriptive Map of London Poverty 1889. Arkell was more shocked and offended by Baildon Street than any other street he visited in Deptford. He was scathing in his comments and assessment of the street, and decided that it should remain coloured black, meaning ‘Lowest class. Vicious, semi-criminal’—an assessment that Booth agreed with. This article takes issue with Booth's assessment of Baildon Street and, in particular, with George Arkell's comments and the picture he painted of the lives and living conditions of those who resided there. The article shows that Baildon Street was not a chaotic place of social transience, nor was it a place systemically rife with prostitution, crime, violence, and child neglect. It also reveals the surprising ideas and factors that influenced Arkell in his investigative work.