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Funded and Managed by
City of London Corporation
The London Archives

Unforgotten Lives Exhibition

Past Exhibition - Digital Experience
woman-viewing-unforgotten-lives-exhibition

Unforgotten Lives

The Unforgotten Lives exhibition took place at The London Archives between April 2023 and March 2024. It presented stories of Londoners of African, Caribbean, Asian and Indigenous heritage who lived and worked in the city between 1560 and 1860 and which are recorded in London’s archives. Exploring a range of experiences from the pages of the extraordinary manuscripts, prints and maps in our collections, these multi-layered stories spoke of love, enterprise, wealth and family life; discrimination, hardship, resilience and resistance.

Informed by our ongoing Switching the Lens research project which aims to reveal London’s complex and long-standing diversity and developed in partnership with Northeastern University London, the exhibition presented evidence of presence and community in a range of incredible documents created nearly 500 years ago. It celebrated well known figures from London’s past and introduces some of the thousands of names discovered in the archives.

Olaudah Equiano, a key figure in the movement to abolish slavery and member of the Sons of Africa, featured with his daughter Joanna. The London life and family of Ellen and William Craft was documented, following their extraordinary escape from enslavement, and a manuscript voting record of Ignatius Sancho from 1774 was displayed for the first time at The London Archives.

Unforgotten Lives - A Digital Experience

Although the Unforgotten Lives exhibition ended in March 2024, you can see the exhibits and experience the display space in this digital experience.

  • We recommend that you view the digital experience on a laptop or PC. Some of the caption texts are long and the images of them which we present here are easier to view on a larger screen. You can zoom in on a touchscreen or phone by pinching, or by using the zoom feature on the browser on a laptop or PC.
  • To look around the exhibition, touch and move on your screen, or click and move your mouse or trackpad on a laptop or PC.
  • To move around the exhibition, click on the blue and red circles to focus on panels or content in cases, or use the navigation bar at the bottom of the screen.
  • Panels which expand to show a clearer version of the text have a white square. Click on the square to see the panel.
  • To see the items in the display cases, click on the red circle and then click the 'i' symbol which appears on the captions and archive documents.
Please note - some of the documents in the Unforgotten Lives exhibition include racist language.

Open the digital exhibition in a new tab - Unforgotten Lives A Digital Experience