Broadsides: Speaking to the People

Broadsides: Speaking to the People is on at Guildhall Library from 5 May to 29 October 2026. It's an exhibition that looks at the history of the broadside — those single sheets of paper that, from the sixteenth century, covered the walls of London and reached people regardless of their social status. They carried news, gossip, advice, satire, songs and melodrama, and at their height in the seventeenth century they worked as a pre-newspaper form of all-encompassing media, often pasted up around the city with a large image at the top and even sold at public executions.

The display draws on the library's own archives, so you'll see original examples rather than reproductions. Among them is an account of the 'strange and wonderful' earthquake that hit the city in 1692, and another of the 1841 fire that ravaged the Tower of London. It's a good way to see how Londoners got their news and shared their stories long before the internet, when a single sheet of paper was the main way to get a message out to the general public.

Blandford Barns, Chairman of the City of London Corporation's Culture, Heritage and Libraries Committee, described the broadside as 'essentially the social media of their age', though he noted it was a good deal more text-heavy than what we use today. It's a fair comparison — the broadside was the city's shared feed, a mix of hard news and popular entertainment that everyone could access. Guildhall Library houses the largest collection devoted to a single city in the world, and this exhibition pulls from that to show how those early sheets of paper shaped the way London spoke to itself.

Entry is free, and the exhibition runs from 5 May through to 29 October 2026 at Guildhall Library, Aldermanbury, London, EC2V 7HH.