The Fire and the Waterman
Will Chandler works the Thames at Old Swan Stairs, in the week the city burns.
14 min on foot · Free
Live now in your phone’s browser
London,
1850.
Search a place. Choose a year. Press Travel. The world around you becomes the one that stood there, reconstructed from what the record actually says.
Place + time = experience
Search. Choose a year.
Press Travel.
History is mostly something you read. Books, Wikipedia, old photographs, museums. But people understand a thing far better when they can put themselves inside it. This turns history from something you read into somewhere you can go. You answer two questions, where am I and when am I, and the world is rebuilt around you.
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Search a place
Type a city or pick one off the map. London, Rome, Stockholm, Colombo, Istanbul, Gothenburg and Paris are walkable today.
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Choose a year
Drag the year back. 1908, then 1850, then 1666. In Rome, back to 1600.
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Press Travel
You arrive, and you walk. Six stops, about a quarter of an hour, each one standing where the thing it describes stood.
The time slider
Move through time.
Stand on the same corner and drag. Buildings go up and come down, roads change their names, the city shrinks, the river fills with a different kind of boat. Instead of reading that London expanded during industrialisation, you watch it happen. Move the slider below.
1747
London, 1747.
The largest city in western Europe, and it knows it. Westminster Bridge is going up, the second crossing London has ever had.
- People
- About 675,000
- On the throne
- George II
- Being built
- Westminster Bridge, opening in 1750
- Where business happens
- Several hundred coffee houses
What arrives with you
What gets rebuilt around you.
Asking a chatbot gets you “tell me about London in 1850”. This is “take me to London in 1850”. You are standing on the corner, and these are the questions it answers for you.
- The streets
- What stood on this corner, and what it was called then.
- The buildings
- Which were here, which were not built yet, which had already gone.
- Clothes
- What people wore to work, and what that told everyone about them.
- Getting about
- On foot, by omnibus, by rail, by boat, and how long it took.
- Trades
- Who sold what on this street, and who bought it.
- Food
- What was eaten, what was in season, what was safe.
- Prices
- What a loaf, a room and a day of labour cost.
- People
- Who lived here, how many, and how they were counted.
- Events
- What was happening that year, on this street and in the country.
- The air
- Noise, smell, smoke and weather. What the street felt like to walk.
Historical confidence
History isn’t always certain.
The further back you travel, the less the record says, and we do not pretend otherwise. Every line is marked with how sure it is: known from the record, likely from strong context, or the model’s best interpretation. The mark sits on the words themselves, not in a footnote.
Fleet Street is the centre of the London newspaper trade. The Daily News and the Standard are printed within a few hundred yards of where you are standing. The air is thick with coal smoke, and the road is jammed with omnibuses, carts and cabs. On the corner a boy sells the morning edition from a wooden crate, and shouts the headline twice.
The archive
Seven cities. Twenty-two walks.
All of them free.
The idea works anywhere, eventually. It does not work everywhere yet, so we would rather tell you what exists than sell you what does not. These twelve are reconstructed and walkable today, on your phone, for nothing. Everything else is honest about not being built.
London
The Coffee House and the New Bridge
Hannah Pyke keeps a coffee house off Fleet Street, in a city running on coffee, news and credit.
14 min on foot · Free
A Walk with a Flower Seller
Nell Baker sells violets and watercress outside St Paul’s. Six stops, from Ludgate Hill down to the river.
14 min on foot · Free
The Conductor’s Round
Ernie Marsh takes the fares on a motor omnibus, in the years the horse starts losing.
16 min on foot · Free
Rome
The Holy Year
Caterina Ruspoli sells herbs in Campo de’ Fiori, in a Jubilee year that fills the city with pilgrims.
14 min on foot · Free
The Cicerone’s Round
Domenico Fabbri guides Grand Tourists through a city that is half building site, half cattle pasture.
15 min on foot · Free
The Year Everything Changed
Assunta Belli, a seamstress, in the autumn the army breaches the wall at Porta Pia.
14 min on foot · Free
Stockholm
Queen Christina’s Harbour
Olof Nilsson carries cargo on the Skeppsbron quay, with the tall ships in and the whole Baltic trade behind them.
16 min on foot · Free
The Tavern on the Square
Brita Lindqvist keeps a tavern on Stortorget, in the middle of the old town.
14 min on foot · Free
The Last of the Horse Trams
Gustav Ek works a horse tram through the city, in its final years on the streets.
14 min on foot · Free
Somewhere missing? Open the app, search for it, and ask us to build it next.
Written down, not promised
Where this is going.
None of the following is in the first release, and none of it has a date. It is written here so you can see the shape of the thing rather than be surprised by it later.
Ask the past
Put a question to the year you are standing in. What would dinner cost, who owns this building, was this street rich or poor.
Meet someone
Dickens in 1850. A merchant in Rome in 100 AD. Answers from inside that life, not above it.
What happened here
The full timeline of one spot. Your office was farmland, then a medieval house, then this.
Compare
London 1850 beside London today. Or London 1850 beside Tokyo 1850.
Follow a person
Travel through a life instead of a place, and let the map move as they move.
Travel between places
London to New York in 1850. No aeroplane. The real ship, the real cost, the real weeks at sea.
Live now
Twenty-two walks. Seven cities.
It runs in your phone’s browser. Nothing to install, nothing to pay, and every walk is free while we build the rest.
London · Rome · Stockholm · Colombo · Istanbul · Gothenburg · Paris
Open the app
It opens in the browser you are already using. There is nothing to download.
It is made for walking, so it lives on your phone.
Point your phone’s camera at this, or type app.worldasitwas.com into it.
Open it on this screen anyway and it will tell you, politely, that it wants a phone.
Still coming
The iPhone and Android apps.
The web app is the whole product today. The store versions add offline walks and a lock screen you can walk with in your pocket.