About

Doorstep History is a gazetteer of places in the United Kingdom, and a growing number abroad, built only from public registers.

Search a postcode, a street or a pair of coordinates and you get a page about that place: the listed buildings around it and their grades, plaques to people who lived nearby, every house sale HM Land Registry has recorded there since 1995, the schools within a kilometre, photographs from Wikimedia Commons and a map.

Pages are compiled on demand. The first visit to a new place asks each register what it holds; the page fills in as the answers arrive and is kept up to date as the registers change.

What makes it different

• Every fact has a source you can open. Tables link to the register's own page for each row. Written sections carry numbered footnotes, and a checker rejects any sentence whose names, dates or numbers are missing from the documents it cites.
• Registers first. We use structured, licensed data and do not search the open web.
• Living people are left out. Notable residents are people commemorated by a plaque or recorded by Wikidata as dead. Current occupants, buyers and sellers are never named.
• No accounts and no cookies. You can rate a place without signing in, and comments open soon. Read the privacy notice.

Who is behind it

Doorstep History is an independent project in its early days. The operator's details and a contact address for corrections and legal notices are being added.

Read how each page is compiled and the full list of sources and licences.