Updates and News

Starting adding historical meetings (2026/04/30)

I have started to add historical meetings from the City of London. The first meetings added are for the years 1855-59, and 1882-84. Once complete, these meetings will range from the mid 1800s to 1999. This will be a slow job though, as it requires manually scanning, cropping, and organizing microfiche from Western's Archives and Special Collections. I am aiming to complete one year per week.

Added trim tool to video transcripts (2026/04/19)

Video transcripts now have a trim tool. If you want to extract clips from a meeting, you can easily set a start and end time, then download the section of the video you wanted. Hopefully this will help to encourage sharing important points raised at city hall.

Made open source scrapers (2026/04/15)

Open source scrapers for the London website are available on my git server. The scrapers are bash scripts, which must be run on a Linux/UNIX environment, or within "Windows Subsystem for Linux". WSL is available on the latest version of Windows. These were intended to be quick proof of concept scripts, so they are not the most cleanly written. If you need assistance getting them to run, or run into errors, please don't hesitate to reach out.

Added ArcGIS maps and Open Data (2026/04/14)

ArcGIS maps and London's Open Data platform are now available on the main page. The maps have been saved as GeoJSON and KMZ. I am not fully sure what the best or standard format is, so please let me know if an additional one is needed.

Rebuilt scrapers (2026/03/07)

Around February 22nd, an update to eScribe broke the London's frontend for listing and accessing meetings. This means that the normal page I crawled to download meetings was inaccessible, and that the scrapers were unable to update the archive. To prevent this issue from happening again, the scrapers have been designed to pull content directly from eScribe, and not through the unreliable city website.
(The city has still not fixed their frontend, and have instead decided to use eScribe's clunky display)

The new scrapers are also able to support any municipality which is using eScribe. While I only plan on supporting London in this archive, you may contact me if you need full data dumps of other cities.

LPS and LTC meetings added (2026/02/10)

All available meetings from the London Police Service and London Transit Commission have been added to the archive. This archive is focused mainly on the government itself, but the LPS and LTC are too well connected with the city to be excluded.

Attachments for the LTC meetings were only available as normal web pages, so I have converted them to PDFs. None of the actual information has changed, but the formatting may be different. If you notice errors, please contact me and I will correct them. LTC meetings from before 2014 were recovered from the Wayback Machine, so that collection will be incomplete.

LPS meetings from before 2024 would not always show links to agendas, minutes, or attachments. Everything listed was archived, but there may be missing material on the LPS's end. The LPS website is actually reallllly bad. I killed it multiple times, with no intention of doing so.
The specific websites used to grab meetings are listed below:

Early meetings added (2025/12/16)

Over 2300 meetings documents from 2000 to 2010 have been added to the archive. These have been scraped from old Wayback Machine crawls, so the documents available will be ones that people specifically wanted to back up, or random selections from bots. As a result, the added documents will be incomplete. However, this partial collection will serve as a starting point for filling in more pre-eScribe documents.
The specific locations used to recover documents are listed below: