Eighteenth Century London Concerts: 1 – The Data

Ranelagh Gardens 1754

This is the first in a series of articles looking at Simon McVeigh’s fascinating dataset “Calendar of London Concerts 1750-1800“. In this article I will describe the data and consider how it can be put into a form suitable for statistical analysis. A second article will look at finding the locations of the concert venues, and I will then move on to some analysis of the dataset.

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Desert Island Discs

“Desert Island Discs” is the UK’s longest running radio show, still going strong on BBC Radio 4 over 78 years after the first episode on the BBC Forces Programme in January 1942. Each episode, an interviewed “castaway” chooses the eight pieces of music they would take with them to a desert island. They also select their favourite of these tracks, plus a book and a luxury item.

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