https://livesbeforeours.co/ Long, sourced documentaries about ordinary life in one city, in one era — read from the records that city left behind. en https://livesbeforeours.co/films/rome-ad-120/ https://livesbeforeours.co/films/rome-ad-120/ Tue, 01 Sep 2026 07:00:00 +0000 Most Romans slept four or five floors above the street, in a room with no kitchen, no chimney and no water. The building might burn down. It might simply fall down. https://livesbeforeours.co/films/athens-430-bc/ https://livesbeforeours.co/films/athens-430-bc/ Tue, 25 Aug 2026 07:00:00 +0000 In the summer of 430 BC, the Parthenon was two years old. There were farmers asleep in the colonnades at the foot of the hill it stood on, and they had been there for more than a year. https://livesbeforeours.co/films/paris-1250s/ https://livesbeforeours.co/films/paris-1250s/ Fri, 21 Aug 2026 07:00:00 +0000 The first sound of a Paris morning in 1256 was a man walking the streets shouting that the baths were hot. https://livesbeforeours.co/films/edo-1700/ https://livesbeforeours.co/films/edo-1700/ Mon, 17 Aug 2026 07:00:00 +0000 Edo in 1700 was almost certainly the largest city on earth. A million people, no sewers worth the name, and a warrior class that had not fought a war in eighty-five years. https://livesbeforeours.co/films/london-1850s/ https://livesbeforeours.co/films/london-1850s/ Thu, 13 Aug 2026 07:00:00 +0000 In 1847, the poorest Londoners had between 52 and 175 cubic feet of air each. Prison regulations of the same decade required a thousand. https://livesbeforeours.co/films/thebes-1250-bc/ https://livesbeforeours.co/films/thebes-1250-bc/ Fri, 07 Aug 2026 07:00:00 +0000 In the fortieth year of Ramesses the Great, a scribe in a walled village outside Thebes wrote forty names down a piece of limestone in black ink — and beside each one, in red, the reason that man had not come to work. https://livesbeforeours.co/films/pompeii-ad-79/ https://livesbeforeours.co/films/pompeii-ad-79/ Mon, 27 Jul 2026 07:00:00 +0000 Everything about Pompeii gets told through one afternoon in the year 79. This is about the other three thousand days. https://livesbeforeours.co/films/london-1340s/ https://livesbeforeours.co/films/london-1340s/ Mon, 13 Jul 2026 07:00:00 +0000 It is just before dawn in the London of 1340, the largest city in England — and not one of the tens of thousands waking inside its old Roman walls has ever seen a clock. This is the last ordinary generation before the Black Death, and tonight we walk it slowly, and quietly, until sleep takes you. https://livesbeforeours.co/films/roman-bathhouses/ https://livesbeforeours.co/films/roman-bathhouses/ Sat, 27 Jun 2026 07:00:00 +0000 The Roman bath has come down to us as a symbol of cleanliness. The reality, read from the ruins of Pompeii and the curse tablets of Bath, is murkier — the same warm water, used by hundreds through the day and changed only rarely. https://livesbeforeours.co/films/medieval-food-1300/ https://livesbeforeours.co/films/medieval-food-1300/ Wed, 17 Jun 2026 07:00:00 +0000 The history books promised them grey gruel and little else. What the manor rolls, the rubbish pits, and their own bones actually reveal is a table far richer — and far stranger — than the legend ever allowed. https://livesbeforeours.co/films/gong-farmer/ https://livesbeforeours.co/films/gong-farmer/ Wed, 10 Jun 2026 07:00:00 +0000 By law, the work could begin only after nine at night. A small gang would open a brick shaft in a London cellar, light a single candle, and climb down into the dark to empty the house’s cesspit by hand. https://livesbeforeours.co/films/tudor-laundry/ https://livesbeforeours.co/films/tudor-laundry/ Thu, 04 Jun 2026 07:00:00 +0000 The hidden chemistry behind Tudor laundry — and why Henry VIII’s linen was whiter than anything we wash today. A long, slow documentary on the forgotten science of clean cloth in sixteenth-century England. https://livesbeforeours.co/films/merthyr-1841/ https://livesbeforeours.co/films/merthyr-1841/ Fri, 22 May 2026 07:00:00 +0000 On a single afternoon in 1841, a Welsh inspector found a 9-year-old boy named Phillip Phillips sitting alone in a coal mine, his face scarred from a fire he’d survived a year earlier — and he was still working. https://livesbeforeours.co/films/vindolanda-tablet/ https://livesbeforeours.co/films/vindolanda-tablet/ Fri, 15 May 2026 07:00:00 +0000 In Roman Britain around AD 100, a woman named Claudia Severa wrote a birthday invitation in her own hand — and the wood survived. https://livesbeforeours.co/films/london-1665/ https://livesbeforeours.co/films/london-1665/ Thu, 07 May 2026 07:00:00 +0000 In 1665, during the Great Plague of London, Samuel Pepys called the parish nurses thieves. The records of one Westminster parish say he was wrong.