Find out what secrets the Victorians buried for us to find...

The book, the database, the project

Explore the archive of objects found

The database contains hundreds of objects discarded by our great great grandparents. Use the database for teaching or research. The text with each entry provides information on minutiae of daily life. Sit back and immerse yourself in everyday Victoriana.
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Book Cover

Read the book that started it all

With 118 pages and 90 colour illustrations, What the Victorians Threw Away is one of the most intimate encounters you’ll have with the generation that invented landfill. Recovering forgotton lives in colourful detail, it also tells of the rise of brands and packaging, and the origins of our throwaway society.
Find out more about the book

Explore the on-going archaeology project

What East Anglia Threw Away investigates a region through its rubbish in the era before World War I. Run by the Centre of East Anglian Studies at the University of East Anglia, it brings together researchers, student diggers, and local history societies in the shared delights of exploring old rubbish dumps.
Find out more about What East Anglia Threw Away

WhatTheVictoriansThrewAway.com is a unique reference resource for researching the hidden lives of the Victorians at home. It brings together for the first time over 500 unique everyday objects, photographed, described and catalogued.

The ground-breaking idea originating in the book What the Victorians Threw Away is to dig up rubbish dumps, and examine what different households discarded, as a new technique for delving into the past.

The objects that emerge often tell intimate stories about the people who used them. Explore this website to bring the world of our great grandparents vividly to life. You can also use it to discover the origins of our throwaway society today.

Get the Book

Find out about the book that started it all, and how to order itFind out about the book that started it all, and how to order it

Explore the database

Dive into the database and explore the objects found

Discover the project

Learn about the What East Anglia Threw Away project

Latest additions to the database:

Children's Items

Childhood and Education

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Birds Ornament
Dolls’ House Tureen
Dolls’ Plate
Mystery Object
Large Doll’s Leg (Side View)
Large Doll’s Leg
Ketchup bottles
German bitters bottle
Bottles for coffee extract
Fruit juice crystals bottle
Whisky flasks
Gillard’s and Lea & Perrin’s sauce bottles
Caviare Jar

Food and Drink

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Cure Bottles

Health

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Wide medicine phial
Elliman’s Embrocation
Medicine bottle, Steward & Son, Yarmouth
Lavender water bottle
Vaseline jar
St Jacob’s Oil, for Rheumatism
Base of cup or vase
Small plate
Coloured tiles
Soap and toiletries holder
Broken plates
Plate with brown pattern
Assorted Crockery

Household

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Railway Jar

Transport

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Beef Extract Pot
Bear’s Grease Pot Lid
Batty’s Nabob Pickle Jar
Hungarian Mineral Water Bottle
Jam and Marmalade Jars
Cream Pot

Latest blog posts:

Household Crockery

Household Crockery

by | Feb 8, 2015

Have you ever wondered how the Victorians survived without tupperware, enamel pans, Pyrex and plastic? The answer is that they used far more crockery – all sorts of ceramic vessels, which broke with great regularity and emerge in thick and densely packed layers in...

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What is a ‘Context’?

What is a ‘Context’?

by | Feb 1, 2015

Imagine that you’re filling  in a large hole with  domestic rubbish. The year  is 1895, so you throw away  much less than we do today.  Indeed, it takes several  weeks to gather enough  bottles, tins and broken  crockery to fill the bucket standing by the kitchen...

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