In the 1830s, Victorian estate agents in London were using an early form of virtual property tours more than 160 years before the emergence of modern real estate websites. Researchers from the University of Exeter have uncovered evidence that Brooks and Green, a high-end estate agency based on Old Bond Street, employed a technique known as the cosmorama to market luxury homes and country estates.
The cosmorama, a popular immersive medium of the time, involved large, detailed paintings placed behind walls and viewed through convex lenses. Combined with carefully arranged lighting, the images appeared three-dimensional, creating a lifelike experience for viewers. Originally developed to showcase exotic landscapes and distant cities, these peepshow-style installations were typically displayed in department stores or as part of travelling exhibitions.
While cosmoramas were widely associated with entertainment and virtual travel, the recent findings reveal they also served a commercial function in real estate marketing. Advertisements from the late 1830s and early 1840s in London newspapers show Brooks and Green invited prospective buyers to their gallery to view cosmoramic images and plans of properties on sale. For example, an 1842 advertisement offered a “delightfully situate cottage residence called the Ray” and emphasized that the pictorial representations enabled viewers to better imagine the property than written descriptions alone.
The research, published in the journal Early Popular Visual Culture and conducted as part of a European project based at Lusofona University in Lisbon, documents more than 650 cosmoramas worldwide. According to Professor John Plunkett, an expert in Victorian visual media at Exeter, these installations provided “virtual travel” experiences during an era when photography was still in its infancy and before the availability of photographs or video tours.
Producing cosmoramas required significant artistic effort, with painters visiting the properties to create accurate and engaging views. The technique allowed estate agents to offer an immersive preview of homes, helping buyers visualize spaces in a way that would not be possible with text descriptions alone.
In contemporary real estate, photos, floor plans, and video walkthroughs are standard tools for marketing properties. This historical discovery highlights how 19th-century agents pioneered similar approaches to engage potential buyers, effectively laying groundwork for the virtual tours widely used in today’s housing market.