The Web was born in 1991. More than 25 years ago Sir Tim-Berners Lee created the first website while at CERN and transformed our lives!
The Museum of London is embarking on a new digital collecting project around the first generation of web designers, digital agencies, artists that created the very first websites in London.

With this project we want to celebrate the beginnings of the Silicon Roundabout, the contribution of the pioneers that embarked very early on the Internet, documenting the creative history of the Web 1.0.

The story of the very first website has been well documented and celebrated over the years, but what the Museum of London wants to do is to tell the story of the first creative agencies and designers that developed and designed the first sites on the Web. Little is known about the designers and creatives that shaped it.

The Web is just over 25 years old and yet most sites from the 90s and early can no longer be accessed. Hardware has become obsolete. Media has become redundant. Files have been lost. We think that everything exists on the internet and it will always live there, but what we don’t really realise is how ephemeral the Web is.

Our aim is to create a collection and digitally archive and preserve in the long term the websites that can still be accessed or even collect their screenshots if the website hasn’t been archived.

The Museum of London has started contacting digital agencies and web designers from the 90s and early 2000s in order to locate saved content. At the same time the museum will be running an oral history project to document the untold story of the beginnings of the Web in London.

If you are an agency, web designer or artist active in the 90s and early 2000s and you would like to include your work in the Museum of London collections, please do get in touch with the curator of the collecting project:

Foteini Aravani
Curator, Museum of London
faravani [at] museumoflondon.org.uk