This page includes information about our aims, the project team, our funding via the NOF-digitise programme and acknowledgements.
Historical Directories is produced and owned by the University of Leicester. It is a digital library of local and trade directories for England and Wales, from 1750 to 1919. Within the digital library you'll find high quality reproductions of comparatively rare books, essential tools for research into local and genealogical history.
The Historical Directories web site provides national coverage and also integrates material from different institutions into a coherent, and free, online collection. It is relevant to amateur historians, academics, teachers and the general public.
At its most basic level, the project seeks to provide at least one directory, for each segment on depicted on the geographical map, for each of the following decades:
Why focus initially on these decades?
Additionally, the Historical Directories project is committed to publishing sample directories from a wider range of dates, for each geographical segment on our map. These include:
Since the project is based at the University of Leicester, special in-depth coverage is given to Leicestershire. We have also given substantial coverage to London and Wales.
The Historical Directories project does not attempt to publish every directory available between 1750 and 1919. Under our funding scheme, the project focuses upon England and Wales only.
If you are unable to find a city or town within a given county, it is worth remembering that we classify locations according to their historical position whenever possible.
Some original directories contain large, fragile and folded maps. We have omitted most of these during the digitisation process, as they are unsuitable for scanning.
This project was made possible by a grant from the New Opportunities Fund, the main distributor of National Lottery good causes money, through the NOF-digitise programme. The New Opportunities Fund has recently been re-branded as the Big Lottery Fund.
Historical Directories has digitised a substantial proportion of material from the impressive stock held at the University of Leicester's Main Library.
We wish to thank our Steering Group members, who have also supplied us with material on behalf of following repositories:
The project is also indebted to other libraries for their loan of directories:
We also wish to thank Dr. Andrew Hann, from the Centre for Urban History at Leicester, who contributed articles to our History Notes section.