Housing environments and health in early modern London, 1550-1750. (360G-Wellcome-079574_Z_06_Z)

The project's key goal is a better understanding of the extent to which environmental factors (including housing) and the social characteristics of individual, family and locality determined the disease and mortality profile of the pre-industrial city. It focuses on three contrasting areas of London in the period 1550-1750, exploring the ways in which a recently-created dataset, representing a unique reconstruction of local populations in their physical setting, can be further extended and interrogated to illuminate and map health and mortality patterns within those populations, and to develop more general conclusions. Specific objectives of the project include: - a detailed analysis of patterns of mortality by house and household in city-centre Cheapside, incorporating data on household wealth, family size and composition, housing quality and amenity, and residential density; - a similar analysis for extramural Aldgate, by local neighbourhoods rather than house by house, but incorporating detailed information on cause of death; - a correlation between large-scale family reconstitution and mortality patterns for suburban Clerkenwell, linking this with population growth and the development of housing and new settlement; - the development of a model of the interaction of the variables noted above in the production of local mortality patterns and outcomes.