ABSTRACT
The range of data sources available to the historical geographer is so extensive as to defy even the simplest of descriptions in a chapter of this nature. In the United Kingdom alone, the tradition of preserving written records containing an overt spatial element within them dates back some 1,400 years to the foundation charters of Anglo-Saxon monasteries. As one approaches the present, the amount of documentation produced and preserved grows to alarming proportions. Indeed, central government of the United Kingdom today produces over one hundred shelf miles of documentation each year. Of this, less than one per cent is preserved and not all of that is available for public inspection. Curiously, the British mania for keeping records is matched by an equal penchant for restricting access to them. Hence we have one hundred year rules on manuscript census material, thirty year rules on Cabinet papers, and the near impossibility of obtaining records on anything pertaining to individual income or wealth. At present the most recent national register of land ownership available for public inspection is Domesday Book, and undoubtedly studies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are considerably hampered by the unwillingness of authorities to release in bulk even such mundane documents as death certificates. This apparent sensitivity to individual privacy is not so widely appreciated in many other European countries, where, notably in Sweden, social data on individuals are readily available for consultation. Similarly in the United States, freedom of information acts theoretically allows access to governmental documentation, even including the Watergate papers!
