History of the Survey

 The Survey of London  was founded in 1894 by C. R. Ashbee, the Arts-and-Crafts architect and idealistic social thinker. The aim was visionary: to discover, record, and by doing so help save, the historic monuments of Greater London. At the time, the East End was expanding rapidly into rural Essex, and the Survey of London's initial focus was on districts up to twenty miles north and east of the City.

From its early efforts, the Survey of London's scope expanded to take in the whole of London. There was a strong campaigning element, and when the first 'parish' study (Bromley-by-Bow) was published, in 1900, it included a conservationist manifesto by Ashbee and a list of threatened and recently demolished historic buildings all over the capital - a forerunner of present-day Buildings at Risk registers.

Today, the Survey of London is as much a work of ongoing urban history as an inventory of individual monuments, and equally concerned with buildings and developments of all periods, including the most recent.

Originally organized and carried out entirely by volunteers, the Survey of London was for many years run by the London County Council and its successor the Greater London Council. With the GLC's abolition it became the responsibility of the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England, which in 1999 was merged with English Heritage.