Capturing a capital past

To celebrate the 250th anniversary of its foundation in 1753, the British Museum has taken the imaginative step of staging an exhibition that recreates the London scene in that year.

It's shocking to see from the fascinatingly detailed maps just how small the capital then was - the fields of vegetables that fed the city began just west of what is now Marble Arch and east of Tower Bridge. Nothing had been built north of Old Street and, apart from a cluster of streets in Bermondsey, the south bank was empty.

With a population of 675,000, it was the largest city in the Western world - and yet it was possible to walk round it in a day.

Until 1750, only London Bridge spanned the river (and that had survived from the 12th century). But with the opening of the bridge at Westminster, the focus of London moved from the warren of streets in the City to the newly laid-out squares of the West End. The smart people shopped in Bond Street (rather than Cheapside); but sheep still grazed in Cavendish Square.

But this is not merely a bricks-and-mortar show. Much of the exhibition is based on the museum's own prints and drawings, and all of life is here - from Hogarth's savage caricatures of gindrinkers, prostitutes and fair-goers (a three-act play in a single scene), to Thomas Woodward, "Citizen, Nightman and Chimney-Sweeper": a man who emptied cesspits and yet possessed such an elegant trade card that it has survived for us to know about him today.

Paul Sandby's etching of a raucous fishwife with her basket of mackerel (from his Twelve London Cries series) shows her tattered clothes and suggests that she was smelling so high that her customers were reluctant to come anywhere near her.

Perhaps the most haunting exhibit is a collection of tokens from the Foundling Hospital in Coram Fields. A tiny coral necklace, the arm of a black wooden doll, a tiny pink silk purse; each one left by a mother in the hope that she could come back to reclaim her child.

There are so many stories in this exhibition: Hannah Snell, who dressed as a man, fought in the Jacobite Rebellion, and later ran a tavern in Wapping; or Elizabeth Chudleigh, who caused a sensation by dancing in the pleasure gardens at Ranelagh in a dress that slipped off her shoulders to reveal her naked breast (she was later convicted of bigamy). They explain why Dr Johnson (whose
dictionary, published in 1755, was compiled at 17 Gough Square, just off Fleet Street), could famously - and justifiably - say in response to Boswell's suggestion that it was possible to get tired of life in noisy, hectic, dangerous London: "No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford."