Some of the detail in the 1920s Lost in Time trilogy comes from family stories of living in the East End of London in the first part of the 20th century. I started there with my story and then read and read and read.
Particularly fun were:
Charles Booth’s London Charles Booth’s poverty maps of London and his notebooks that contributed to the Inquiry into Life and Labour in London (1886-1903).
Lost England 1870-1930 by Philip Davies Images of 19th and 20th-century England show reality of rotting houses and poverty as well as grand old buildings
The Long, Long Trail is brilliant for researching soldiers of the British Army in the Great War
Monty Glover‘s photos and journals are a fascinating insight in to gay life in the early 20th Century. Some of James Gardiner’s book about him, A Class Apart: The private pictures of Montague Glover is available online.
The British police have never carried firearms. Unless they did.
And where would we be without MisterSlang‘s The Timeline of Slang or Baby Names of the 1890s?
For in-depth reading, I highly recommend:
- Matt Houlbrook: Queer London :: Perils & Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918-1967
- Matt Cook’s Queer Domesticities :: Homosexuality and Home Life in Twentieth-Century London
- Stephen Bourne: Fighting Proud :: Gay men who served in the two world wars
- Matt Cook: London and the Culture of Homosexuality, 1885-1914
- Ed. Kevin Porter & Jeffrey Weeks: Between the Acts :: Lives of homosexual men 1885-1967
- Graham Robb: Strangers :: Homosexual love in the nineteenth century