Survey of London

It was founded in 1894 by Charles Robert Ashbee, an Arts-and-Crafts designer, architect and social reformer[1] and was motivated by a desire to record and preserve London's ancient monuments.

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.

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.

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.

Work has begun on Whitechapel, the historically rich and complex area on the eastern fringe of the City of London.

Nearly twenty years after that, an eighteenth volume was issued, describing the Charterhouse in Smithfield and written by Philip Temple (2010).