What if walls could talk? Writing on the Wall is told through the marks its citizens left behind revealing lost voices from the highest to the lowest in society – political prisoners, sex workers, homesick sailors, Romantic poets and the artisans of the industrial revolution. From the centre of London to the islands of the Caribbean, here are lives, loves, triumphs and failures, scratched into the walls of prisons and latrines, chalked up on doors and etched into windows. The names of their creators may be lost to history, but together they tell the real story of Britain’s most rebellious and transformative century.

“You’ve read the Austen and seen the Gainsboroughs, well this is the real Eighteenth Century” Dan Snow

Madeleine Pelling is a cultural historian, author and broadcaster. She is co-host of History Hit’s After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds and the Paranormal, and a regular contributor for television and publications including The Guardian, and BBC History Magazine.

Dr Caroline Dodds Pennock is the author of On Savage Shores: How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe. She is Senior Lecturer in International History at the University of Sheffield and is a history writer and broadcaster.