So I was idly researching a silly little short story I want to write about a seven-year-old living in 1950s London (
Ben Croaker, FYI? Yeah, he used to be seven years old. In the '50s. HARD TO IMAGINE AND KIND OF DISTURBING I KNOW, but hey, everyone has backstory.) and came across some awesome links fellow history geeks and writers might like, and wanted to share. Not all are totally relevant to what I was looking for, but hey!
Join Me in the 1900s isn't quite what I needed, but I will definitely come back to it because I have another WIP that needs a lot of '30s-'40s daily life research. The webmaster and her mother mother give their own firsthand explanations about daily life as they experienced it from the 1900s through the 1950s. A lot of it is particularly about what it was like to be a child at the time -- and I feel like I noticed way different things about, say, the late '80s and early '90s than the adults in my life did, so that particular perspective is really useful. There are also testimonials from site visitors who wanted to add their recollections. I think my favorite one of these comes from
this page on rationing and British Restaurants in the '40s:
I went to a British Restaurant in Edgware once but all I remember was the very runny custard.
--Christine Tolton
I have memories like this. My trip to the UK when I was five or six is a blur of pork pies, grumpy parents, and thinking that because the place we were staying at was called the Robinson Crusoe Inn, it was owned by Robinson Crusoe himself. And when I went to Pittsburgh for a week a few years later, the only thing I can recollect is surprising my grandfather, trains, the Carnegie Mellon campus, and the entirely pink outfit I wore one day. (This was just before my anti-pink phase, I think.)
Exploring 20th Century London has omg everything. PICTURES. ARTICLES. ORAL HISTORIES. On tons of topics! Organized by decade! This makes me very, very happy. For example, there is a nice little article on
Jewish London with related articles linked, and a similar article on
the smog. (Actually, I'm kind of surprised the Great Smog of 1952 doesn't warrant its very own article, because when we learned about it in college I was like HOLY CRAP
THAT'S PEA SOUP FOG?, but
there's one on Wikipedia for the edification of all.)
One thing I do need to know that I haven't yet figured out, is whether the
Balawat gates would have been set up similar to the way they are now. I am guessing the arrangement has changed a little since then, but it does look like some of the layouts in other galleries rooms were reasonably similar to the way I remember them being. But my memory is awful, and a lot of the pictures on Wiki are vague drawings or bad photos from the dawn of time, so if anyone has better information, do tell. (I think the current layout is GENIUS, because it made me walk totally past the Rosetta Stone, which is probably always surrouned by a swarm of people and hard to get at, and straight to OMG LAMASSU.)
I'm starting to wonder if maybe I write weird niche fic because I like to research absurd minutia, and not the other way around. (Did they even do school trips to museums in the '50s? They played on the
roof to prevent rickets? They'd never let kids do that now. Wait, Ding-Dong-Ditch is called Knocky-Door Ginger? That's a totally awesome name, but...
why? Oh look, here's Croaker's childhood tube stop! ...It's totally a shack. BRITISH MUSEUM WEBSITE, TELL ME WHEN YOU ACQUIRED THESE SPECIFIC EXHIBITS OR I WILL DO SOMETHING DASTARDLY oh thank you, Wikipedia, you are much more informative.) Either way, now I know even more useless trivia!
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