The fabric of London: two centuries of fire insurance policies

Applications are invited for an Open-Oxford-Cambridge AHRC DTP-funded Collaborative Doctoral Award at the University of Cambridge, in partnership with the Aviva Group.  

This fully-funded studentship is available from October 2025. Further details about the value of an Open-Oxford-Cambridge AHRC DTP award are available on the DTP’s studentships page. 

Closing date:7th January 2025 (midday, UK time)

Project overview 

The insurance industry, a central part of the financial world today, was born in the City of London from a desire to avert the risks of fire after the Great Fire of 1666 that destroyed most of the old City. The Aviva Group currently holds the most important insurance archive in the UK, with records of many companies dating back to the late seventeenth century. In a project with Dr Alexis Litvine of Cambridge University the manuscript policy registers of the Hand in Hand insurance company have been digitised and transcribed using cutting-edge AI handwriting recognition tools. The site at https://amicablecontributors.com relies on crowdsourcing to plot more than half a million insurance policies onto digital historical maps of London: from mansions and hospitals to workshops and poorhouses. The resulting dataset will recreate in unprecedented detail the London property market from the 1690s to the 1860s, revealing changes in the fabric of the city and its economy during a key phase of its expansion. Users can easily search extracts of the digitised policies for references to the parish, road name or other geographical markers in order to locate buildings. The policy entries include the construction materials and the name of the building’s owner. The CDA holder will have scope to develop the project according their own interests. One option would be to focus on building history and the materials of construction as they change over time and across the City. Another would be to concentrate on economic history and the ownership patterns revealed by the policies, with a prosopographical study of landowners’ inheritance and succession. There are other possibilities, and the invaluable series of books on the built environment produced by the London Topographical Society will be essential references, especially Dorian Gerhold’s . The temporal focus of the CDA may cover the full 170 years or it may focus on a shorter time period, incorporating complementary records such as the Land Tax or rate books or the records of the London Livery Companies, as appropriate. This will be the first large-scale study of insurance policies. 

The CDA award will showcase the potential of business sources in general and insurance records in particular – both classes of historical documents which are under-used by historians at least partly because many are located in present-day business headquarters rather than in major archives. Towards the end of the award, the CDA holder will gain experience of public history presentation through co-designing with the archivists an online exhibition with the potential for displays and public talks at Aviva’s offices in Norwich or the company’s London headquarters in Fenchurch Street, in the heart of the old City.  

Supervision 

The holder will be supervised by Prof. Amy Erickson, a specialist in eighteenth-century London, and Dr Alexis Litvine, a digital history expert, both based in the Cambridge Group for the History of Population & Social Structure (CamPop) at the University of Cambridge, and by Anna Stone, Archivist at Aviva, who is a specialist in insurance history. Most of the research will use the digital resource https://amicablecontributors.com but there will also be archival work at Aviva’s headquarters in Norwich and at the London Metropolitan Archives. The Aviva Archives team will provide hands-on experience of archival management in a business environment. The CDA holder will benefit from the technical expertise in mapping and data analysis accumulated by the team at CamPop, will have the opportunity to contribute to the development of future digitisation of more records held by Aviva, and will collaborate in developing automated text recognition software with a new spin-out company, Osiris-AI, led by Dr Alexis Litvine and supported by Cambridge Enterprise.  

How to apply 

We invite applications from candidates from all backgrounds and ethnicities. Applicants will ideally have a masters’ degree in History or in a related subject with a demonstrable interest in the history of London. Applicants should meet the eligibility criteria for Open-Oxford-Cambridge AHRC studentships. 

For an informal discussion about the opportunity and how you might frame your approach to the CDA project, please contact Amy Erickson (ale25@cam.ac.uk) in the first instance. 

You should apply to the University of Cambridge by 7th January 2025 (midday, UK time), indicate your interest in being considered for an Open-Oxford-Cambridge AHRC DTP studentship and submit a completed copy of the OOC DTP Application Form at the same time.

Please see the advert on the Cambridge jobs site.