Survey of London

The Survey of London is a research project to produce a comprehensive architectural survey of the former County of London. It was founded in 1894 by Charles Robert Ashbee, an Arts-and-Crafts architect and social thinker, and was motivated by a desire to record and preserve London's ancient monuments. The first volume was published in 1900, but the completion of the series remains far in the future. It was initially a volunteer effort, but later became a government-sponsored project, administered since 2013 by The Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London.

The Survey consists of a series of volumes based mainly on the historical parish system. Each volume gives an account of the area, with sufficient general history to put the architecture in context, and then proceeds to describe the notable streets and individual buildings one by one. The accounts are exhaustive, reviewing all available primary sources in detail. The Survey devotes thousands of words to some buildings that receive the briefest of mentions in the Buildings of England series (itself a vast and detailed reference work by most standards). However the earlier volumes largely ignored buildings built after 1800.

Due to the scale of the existing endeavour there are no current plans to extend the project to take in the whole of Greater London. As of 2015, 50 volumes in the main series have been published. Separately, 18 monographs on individual buildings have been published. Most of the volumes have not been updated since publication, but those published online (up to Vol. 47) have received a limited amount of updating.

Since 2008 the Survey of London has been published by Yale University Press. With the publication of the volumes on Clerkenwell in 2008, colour photography was used for the first time, and the images incorporated in the text – previously they had been grouped separately as plates. A further volume on Woolwich was published in 2012, and two on Battersea appeared in late 2013. Work is nearing completion on two volumes on the eastern part of Marylebone south of Marylebone Road, due for publication at the end of 2016. Work has begun on Whitechapel, the historically rich and complex area on the eastern fringe of the City of London.

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