Walking Victorian Spitalfields with Israel Zangwill

Abstract

This article discusses Zangwill’s Spitalfields, a mobile app with content curated, written, and produced by Nadia Valman, Soda Ltd (developer) and the Jewish Museum, London (archive collaborator). The app uses Israel Zangwill’s novel Children of the Ghetto (1892) as a walking guide to the Jewish immigrant subculture of Victorian Spitalfields, east London, which the novel describes at a moment of critical change. Zangwill’s Spitalfields exploits the app’s potential for bringing together a range of digital sources including archive photographs, museum objects, and oral history recordings with the user’s observations of the physical environment, to produce an experience that is both immersive and multivocal. Mobile digital technology has provided a new interpretive context for the Jewish Museum’s collection, and animated previously unmarked monuments in Spitalfields. By drawing on the user’s experience of walking in present-day Spitalfields, the app also intervenes into a historiography increasingly shaped by nostalgia.