When did maps first appear in England?
The Town Plan
The Rise of the County Map
The Industrial Age
All at Sea
When were road maps invented?
Mapping the Rocks
The Ordnance Survey
Colour printing arrives
Maps below ground?
The Streets of London
New Directions
This brief history is a bringing together of maps from many internet sources. The magnifying glass icons
lead to enlargements for detailed study. For more information on a particular map, an image search on the name will reveal my original source pages which
existed in December 2008.
When did maps first appear in England?
The earliest maps produced in England were the religious world maps
or in Latin mappa mundi. Probably one of the most famous is the Mappa Mundi which is displayed in Hereford Cathedral
and was drawn around 1300 AD on vellum (a single calfskin). It was intended to include all known places but also to be
instructional and include historical information so the shape of the land is more artistic than realistic. It is centered
on the city of Jerusalem as the religious heart of the known world, east is to the top and the British Isles are tucked
down on the bottom left of the map (see enlarged picture). It measures 1.58 by 1.33 metres.
An earlier map from around 1000 AD is found in Sir Robert Cotton’s
seventeenth century library which is now in the British Library collection; the map shows the Roman provinces in detail and,
as usual, Britain is again relegated to the bottom left corner of the map. The green button links to a traced copy with
the names printed and easier to read, dating from around 1836.
Bound in between the Topographia Hiberniae and the Expungnatio Hibernica in
Gerald of Wales codex is a map of Europe. The important cities of Rome and Constantinople are shown but also an indication of
the British Isles with the rivers Thames and Severn and the cities of Ebor (York), Lincoln, London and Winchester. It measures
67 by 45 cm and was drawn around 1200 AD.
Brother Matthew of Paris (ca.1200 - 1259) was an English chronicler,
a Benedictine monk in St.Albans Abbey from 1217 to 1259. His maps include a mappamundi, a London-Rome itinerary, a
schematic diagram of the seven kingdoms of Anglo-Saxon England (Kent, Sussex, Wessex, Mercia, Northumbria,
East Anglia and Suffolk) and this map of the British Isles.
The map bought by collector Richard Gough for a half-crown (one-eighth
of £) at a sale of antiquarian Thomas Martin’s collection in 1774 is probably the earliest known map of the British Isles
in existence. It is drawn on two pieces of vellum and measures 115cm wide by 55 cm high. It dates from around 1360 and
curiously has east to the top of the map. It does not show roads but routes are given by straight red lines between towns
and cities with distances in leagues (the distance a person, or a horse, can walk in 1 hour of time - usually about 3.5 miles
or 5.5 kilometres) given in Roman numerals. The coast of England is well rendered and the compiler knew the main carrier
routes, their intersections and the way they related to the river systems. It seems to show the most accurate detail for areas
the troops reached during Edward I’s military expeditions into Wales and Scotland.
There are four basic groups of symbols representing settlements: houses, towns with and without walls, cathedral cities
and monasteries with crossed spires and castles with towers and/or crenellations.
Queen’s University has created a ‘Gough Map Viewer’ at http://www.qub.ac.uk/urban_mapping/gough_map/
The craft of cartography was boosted by the Italian invention of printing maps
from copper plates in 1473, while advances in scientific learning helped the Dutch and Flemish to become the masters of map making
by the late 1500’s. Martin Waldseemüller published a map of the British Isles in 1522 in his in Cosmographiae Introductio.
Angliæ figura is a manuscript map from the Cotton Library dating ca. 1540 and shows latitude and longitude
based on a meridian west of the British Isles.
The first map printed from copper-engraved plates known of Britain is Britanniæ
Insulæ, drawn in 1546 by George Lily. He was a Catholic, exiled by Henry VIII to Rome, where the map was printed as an
illustration for a book on the British Isles written by a Roman bishop.
Gerardus Mercator, actual name Gerhard Kramer, (1512-1594), the Flemish cartographer,
published this map of the British Isles in his 1595 world atlas, Atlas Sive Cosmographicae Meditationes de Fabrica Mundi et
Fabricati Figura. Incidentally this is the first time the word ‘atlas’ was used as a description. One further edition
was published by the Mercator family in Duisberg in 1602 but, in 1604, the copperplates for the atlas were sold and in 1606,
Jocodus Hondius introduced a revised edition of Mercator’s atlas but included this map from the Mercator plates. This particular
map appeared in the Latin edition of the Mercator Hondius Atlas of 1613.
Les Isles Britanniques : qui contiennent les royaumes d’Angleterre, Escosse & Irelande, distingues en leurs principales
provinces, subdivisees en leurs shireries, ou comtes, tire de G. Cammdene, Chr. Saxton, I. Speede, T. Pont, R. Gordon,
et de I.B. Boazius’ was published in 1673 by Nicholas Sanson. In 1683 it appeared in Description de tout L’Univers.
The Town Plan
Town plans were slow to appear in England as most towns were so small as to make a
plan unecessary and it was the sixteenth century before plans began to appear in books. They were woodcuts and show views with buildings
shown in elevation. This is Norwich in William Cunningham’s surveying book of 1558.
William Smith’s 1568 map, Brightstowe, vulgo; quondam venta, florentissimum
Angliae Emporium. was published in Cologne by Georg Braun and Frans Hogenberg in 1588. From the book Civitates Orbis Terrarum
(Towns of the World), which took Braun, the editor, and Hogenberg, the engraver, over twenty years to produce. It was issued in
six volumes from 1572 to 1617 to complement Ortelius’ Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, the first modern atlas. The sheep are a reminder
that Bristol was an important city for the British wool trade.
The ‘Agas’ map is the earliest printed map - or rather map view - of London. The Guildhall Library in London, the Public Record Office
and Magdalene College, Cambridge hold the only three known impressions. They were printed from a set of eight woodblocks and
published in 1633. The map is based on a larger map printed from copper plates in the 1550‘s. The date of the first printing of
the ‘Agas’ map can be fixed between 1561 and 1571 from topographical evidence. It is almost certainly not by Ralph Agas but
his name has been associated with the map for centuries. In fact its designer and engraver are unknown. It is believed to have
been commissioned by Queen Mary.
This is a map by Ralph Agas of Oxford published in 1578.
The Rise of the County Map
Counties were the important administrative area in the sixteenth century and the
first English printed maps were a County Series by Christopher Saxton, a Yorkshire estate surveyor born in 1542.
There were 34 maps surveyed and engraved between 1573 and 1577 and published in a bound volume in 1579. Two government
ministers Sir Thomas Seckford and William Cecil, Lord Burghley, commissioned the maps for state use. There is no
standard symbols key and no lines of latitude or longitude; also no routes or roads are shown. In fact the main feature
is his curious ‘sugar-loaf’ hills. However Elizabeth I seems to have been satisfied and, on July 20th 1577,
granted Saxton a licence for the exclusive publication of the maps for a ten year period. This is Herefordshire
engraved by William Hole in William Camden’s ‘Britannia’ 3rd Latin edition 1627 based on Saxton’s map.
Camden died in 1623 but editions of his work (in English) continued to be published until 1722. It was the first descriptive
survey of the British Isles.
The first estate maps were essentially diagrams accompanying written descriptions.
These were supplemented by enclosure maps which showed areas of communal land to be enclosed by agreement and from 1590,
with improved surveying tools, these were drawn with greater accuracy. From 1770 Parliamentary enclosures had legal
authority. This is an early map of the Charterhouse estate in the parish of Broad Hinton, Wiltshire in 1616 showing large,
open fields divided into tenants’ strips, and some more recently enclosed fields to the left.
Three men, John Norden, William Smith and John Speed, worked on updating Saxton’s
maps adding roads and a key. John Norden, a Somerset estate surveyor, invented the triangular table of distances that is still familiar
today at the back of road atlases and also overlaid a grid with reference numbers and letters so you refer to the square where a feature
appeared. In 1625 he began publishing a series of county histories with maps - England, an Intended Guyde for English Travailers
incorporating roads for the first time and his mileage tables, explained thus:
The use of this Table.
The Towns or places between which you desire to know,
the distance you may find in the names of the Towns in
the upper part and in the side, and bring them in a square
as the lines will guide you: and in the square you shall
find the figures which declare the distance of the miles.
And if you find any place in the side which
will not extend to make a square with that above, then
seeking that above which will not extend to make a square,
and see that in the upper, and the other side, and it will
show you the distance. It is familiar and easy.
Bear with defects, the use is necessary.
Invented by JOHN NORDEN
The reworking of survey data brought up some curious anomalies. There is a story that Saxton missed out the name of the
village of North Burcomb on his Wiltshire map of 1576, John Speed added ‘query’ to this point, and Robert Morden
around 1700 took this as a village name, ‘Quare’.
John Speed’s Jacobean atlas, The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britain
was published in 1611 (First Edition) in London by John Sudbury & George Humble. It could be bought in black and white or
hand-coloured which added about half as much again to the price. Further editions followed in 1616 and 1627. It was based
on Saxton’s surveys but improvements included the marking of Hundred boundaries and the inclusion of town plans. The
engraving was carried out by the Flemish engraver Jodocus Hondius Senior (1563-1612), a leading engraver and mapmaker in
Amsterdam who had lived in England from 1583 to 1593. The county shown in the examples below is Herefordshire;
the three versions show very clearly the difference a good hand colourist can make to legibility and presentation.
The next map is from the 1616 edition of John Speed’s map of the British Isles. It is
based on Saxton’s England and Wales, the 1591 Hondius map of Ireland and Mercator’s map of Scotland. Uniquely it
includes panoramas of London and Edinburgh, reflecting the recent Union of the Crowns. Also shown are two ancient coin portraits
of Britannia and Cunobelinus. The seas are full of monsters, sailing ships, and animals of the realm while cherubs with geographical
instruments support the mileage scale in the lower left corner and the Royal Arms appear at upper left above the image of London. The
attractiveness of Speed’s maps always made them best-sellers.
John Speed produced this world map in “Prospect Of The Most
Famous Parts Of The World” first published by George Humble in 1627. This was the first world atlas
produced in England and is full of interesting details including portraits, the elements, constellations
and eclipses. California is shown as an island and this fact was copied on many subsequent maps.
On Lewis’s Map of England and Wales of 1640 is this illustration of the
General Post Office in London from where all distances from London were measured.
John Seller’s map of Surrey in 1695, probably surveyed by John Oliver, was
published in an atlas, Anglia Contracta, or a Description of the Kingdom of England. These maps were some of the
first showing longitude using St Paul’s Cathedral in London as the prime meridian.
The Industrial Age
A Plan of the River Tees and of the intended Navigable Canal from Stockton by Darlington to Winston in the Bishoprick of Durham
is a fine example of the engraved maps needed to impress investors to join the project. This was published in 1772 in the Gent Magazine
and is based on a survey by Richard Whitworth.
The Manchester Ship Canal was a little larger. Thirty-six miles (58km)long
it was built to link the industrial centre of Manchester to the port of Liverpool and still operates today (2010). It was
designed by civil engineer Sir Edward Leader Williams. However an important local landowner, Sir Humphrey de Trafford, opposed
its construction and work only began two years after his death. This was the final approved plan and Queen Victoria officially
opened ‘The Big Ditch’ (its local nickname) on 21st May 1894.
All at Sea
Coastal guides for seafarers first appeared around 1528 with Robert Copland’s
translation of Pierre Garcie’s Le Grant Routtier as The Rutter of the Sea which included soundings, wind
and tidal flows around the south coast of England. This developed into the Portolan chart. However Mercator’s new map projection of
1569, designed to assist sailors, was eventually used in Sir Robert Dudley’s Arcano del Mare or Secrets of the Sea.
This was the first atlas published on Mercator’s projection, the first sea atlas to cover the whole world. Dudley, the son of Queen
Elizabeth’s favourite, was a political exile from England at the time. The maps were engraved by Antonio Francesco Lucini and was
first published in 1646 in Florence and a second, enlarged edition appeared, posthumously, in 1661.
By 1675, John Seller’s ‘Atlas Maritimus’ or the ‘Sea-Atlas’
included more practical and accurate charts showing compass points and bearings. ‘A Chart of the Brittish
Chanel’ by John Seller Hydrographer to the Kings Most Excellent Majestie (King Charles II) makes an interesting
comparison to the Dudley map. As the King’s Hydrographer, Seller was granted a 30-year privilege giving him a monopoly
on publishing nautical atlases in England.
When were road maps invented?
People had always written down itineries for journeys between cities and
Matthew Paris was the first to draw a strip road map for the route from London to Rome. However John Ogilby from Dundee (1600 - 1676)
took this idea and developed it into a complete set of strip maps for the post roads of England and Wales. He published these in
Britannia in 1675, a 300-sheet volume with map pages 34 by 46cm, using a map scale of 1 inch to 1 mile. It was dedicated to
His Majesty Charles II, who in the previous year had made John Ogilby ‘His Majesty’s Cosmographer and Geographick Printer’ with a
salary of £13.6s.8d per annum.
In the Delineation or Decyphering these Roads upon Copper-Sculptures:
1. We have Projected them upon imaginary Scrolls, the Initial City or Town being always
at the Bottom of the outmost Scroll on the Left Hand; whence your Road ascends to
the Top of the said Scroll; then from the Bottom of the next Scroll ascends again, thus
constantly ascending till it terminate at the Top of the outmost Scroll on the Right Hand,
as by the Succession of Figures representing the Miles, mostly plainly appears.
2. The Road itself is express’d by double Black Lines if included by Hedges, or Prick’d Lines
if open; but if the Road be describ’d altogether by Black Lines or Prick’d Lines throughout
the whole Plate, then the Distinction aforesaid of Encl’d and Open is omitted.
3. The Scale by which the said Road is Protracted, is according to one Inch to a Mile,
or the 63'360th. Part of a Mile; the said Miles being exprest by double Points, and
numbered by the Figures 1, 2, 3, etc. Each subdivided into 8 Furlongs, represented
by the single Points included between the said double Ones.
Thomas Kitchin drew and engraved a set of road maps in Kitchin’s Post-Chaise
Companion through England and Wales which was published by John Bowles in 1767. The maps were originally prepared by
John Senex in An Actual Survey Of all the Principal Roads of England and Wales. He printed and sold them at the
Globe in Salisbury Court, Fleet Street in 1719. They were updated and had additions by Kitchin.
In 1741 surveyor Thomas Badeslade and engraver William Toms published Chorographia
Britanniæ, a county atlas dedicated to the Prince Regent, later George II. Now useful notes were appearing. This is
the 1742 edition.
In the 1700’s, few new surveys were carried out and, following the passing of
England’s first copyright law which discouraged copying of earlier maps, the newly-formed Society of Arts instituted
a competition to encourage new map production in 1759. By coincidence the last great county mapmaker, John Cary, produced
his first engraved plan in 1779 and published his The New and Correct English Atlas whuch was completed in 1809.
It was so popular that a Cary became an essential household reference book. This is his ‘A New Map of
Hampshire’, from 1801 at a scale about 2.5 miles to 1 inch.
Mapping the Rocks
In the early nineteenth century one man turned mapmaking in a new direction. From a
simple marking up of a map of the area around Bath, an Oxfordshire land surveyor, William Smith, produced the first
geological map of the whole of England based on maps engraved by John Cary. Smith wanted a scale of five miles to the
inch and John Cary agreed to bear some of the costs of production. The base map, 188 by 266 cm (74” by 105”),
was printed from 15 separate copperplate engravings each 61 x 61 cm (24” x 20”) in size. The geology was
water-coloured by hand by colourists, often girls, under Smith’s direction; difficult work because of the shading
used. He made continual corrections and modifications as copies were produced. Around four hundred were produced from
1815 to 1817.
William Smith also produced the ground-breaking
Geological Table of British Organized Fossils
which served a detailed legend for the geological map. It was a coloured engraving, it measured about 38 by 45 cm and sold at the
time for 1s.6d.
His story is brought vividly to life in Simon Winchester’s book The Map that Changed the World.
Another famous map was published in 1854 in Dr John Snow’s book On the Mode
of Communication of Cholera. There was a cholera outbreak in London in 1854 and by mapping the deaths (shown as short
lines on the map) and studying their distribution he concluded that the Broad Street Pump, one of thirteen water pumps in
Soho, was the likely source deducing that cholera was a water-borne disease, not carried in the foul smell of sewage as most
people, including Florence Nightingale, believed. Interesting to note that the majority of those who died became ill on one
night, the 31st August, and died one or two days later. The brewery had it’s own water supply so no deaths were reported
from those working there.
Specialist maps began to appear in the eighteenth century. Britannia Saxonica
was drawn by Robert Morden, engraved by John Sturt and published in the edition by Edmund Gibson of Camden’s Britannia
published in 1722.
By the late nineteenth century they were fashionable. German mapmakers produced
the British Isles and its Religious Divisions in the Historisches Handatlas by Dr Carl Spruner and
Thomas Menke. It was published by Justus Perthes in Gotha, Germany in 1879. The map sheet is dated 1876. The main map
shows the religious divisions of the British Isles from the beginning of the 13th century to the time of the Reformation.
Inset upper right are the divisions in Anglo-Saxon times and lower right is a map of Britain showing the religious
divisions since 1543. The seats of Archbishops and Bishops are shown together with major cathedrals, churches and monasteries.
Moving briefly north of the border, the Clans of Highland Scotland were mapped
in 1899 by Thomas Johnston and Colonel James Robertson for their classic book, Historical Geography of the Clans
of Scotland. The map is reproduced here courtesy of Alastair McIntyre from Toronto and his amazing Electric
Scotland website.
In 1938, the Air Ministry released a series of maps for use by the British Royal
Air Force (RAF) which covered England, Scotland and Wales. These maps were used throughout the Battle of Britain and
included military locations such as firing ranges and beacon lights providing information for night navigation.
This is part of a set of four digitised at 4 times the enlargement reproduced here by Scott Gentile and available
to buy from A2A Simulations Online Store.
The last major event in the development of English maps was the formation of the Ordnance Survey.
The Ordnance Survey
The Ordnance Survey, England’s government-funded official
mapping agency, had modest beginnings. William Roy of the Royal Engineers was one of the officers tasked to
produce a survey of Scotland following the Jacobite rebellion of 1745-6. He tried to persuade Parliament to
authorise a survey of the whole of Britain but funding was not forthcoming. However he was later employed by
the Royal Society to survey the relative positions of the two observatories in Greenwich, London and Paris.
When this was completed, a Trigonometrical Survey of the Board of Ordnance was formed in 1791 to extend this
triangulation survey to the whole of Great Britain. The first base line was measured by William Roy on Hounslow
Heath in 1784. From the ends of this line bearings were taken to a third point to make a triangle, each of whose
new sides was a new base line. The triangulation process was repeated until a network of triangles covered the
country. The principal triangulation stations were chosen about 30 to 50km apart with secondary statione around
10km apart. The sides of triangles varied from 10km to over 100km, the largest being those linking Britain to Ireland
and France. Bearings were measured with Ramsden’s 3-ft theodolite which was destroyed by bombing in World War
II but a second instrument made in 1791 is in the Science Museum, London. The Principal Triangulation by the
Ordnance Survey used some measurements taken in 1790s and many more between 1840 and 1860. The whole was recalculated
and published in 1858.
This is a modern trig. station, a concrete pillar with a metal insert on which to
set the theodolite. A hole down the centre of the pillar allows a plumb-bob to be set on a hidden metal point which is
fixed into matural rock or concrete at ground level.
The first maps printed were at a scale of 6” to 1 mile (1:10,560) for military use
along the south coast of England but half this scale elsewhere. The final published maps were at a scale of 1” to 1 mile
(1:63,360), as William Roy had originally proposed. They used a series of simple local cylindrical projections called
‘Cassini’ projections which are straightforward but do introduce north-south distortions to the country.
The southern half of England and Wales was mapped by 1815 and the work was finally completed in 1874. Here is the 1852 one-inch
Series 1 map of Lancashire in the north-west of England revised to show the Midland Railway line which replaced the
‘Little’ North Western Railway line from Lancaster to Poulton in 1874:
Tithe maps were prepared following the Tithe Commutation Act
in 1836. This act replaced tithes paid by farmers to the Church in kind, that is a tenth of a corn crop, a tenth
of the lambs born each year and so on, with a tax based on the value and type of land farmed. This needed accurate
field boundary maps but the scale to be used was not fixed although 1” to 4 chains (1:3,168) and 1” to 3 chains
(1:2,376) seem the most widely used.
Anyway this was no help to the ‘Ordnance Survey’ as it had now become known.
They were coming round to the idea of 24” or 25” to 1 mile (1:2,640 or 1:2,534) as being the most useful for
land purposes. Then in 1853 an International Statistical Conference in Brussels recommended an international
standard of 1:2,500 which curiously was the scale chosen for the Napoleonic survey of France. (This is equivalent
to 25.34” to the mile as a point of interest!). This was the time of the railway boom and increasing
industrialisation for which maps were needed and Britain at this time had the most detailed maps of any world
country. Here is another example from Lancashire, Series 2, dated 1893:
From 1887 coloured maps gradually replaced the earlier black-and-white versions.
These three examples show the various ideas that the Ordnance Survey tried out:
1. Brown dotted shading and contours in feet above the assumed Mean Level of the Sea
at
Liverpool, which is 0.650 of a Foot below the general Mean Level of the Sea ...
* Derby: 2 miles:1 inch, 1907
2. A more subtle ‘Hill-shaded’ North Mayo Road Map reduced from the 1899 One-Inch Map
* North Mayo: ½ inch:1 mile, 1914
3. A ‘Layers’ shading for the South Mayo Road Map reduced from the 1902 One-Inch Map
* South Mayo: ½ inch:1 mile, 1914
The Ordance Survey produced different maps during the World
Wars. The military produced a few 1;20,000 maps at the time of the First World War and by the 1930’s a set of
maps at 1:25,000 had been produced. The grid references used today were first created for military
maps in 1919 and a Modified British System was used through WWII. A committee devised the present National Grid
in 1938 based on using the international metre. It’s point of origin is south-west of the Scilly Isles.
When it became clear that another war was looming the OS rushed out a ‘Special
Emergency Edition’ of the 1:10560 County quarter sheets in 1938 for Air Raid Precaution (ARP) planning and not
sold to the public. These maps are rare now and you can see where new houses have been added as unshaded strips.
In 1936 it was decided to begin a retriangulation. England and the south of
Scotland were completed by 1938, but war delayed the surveying and it was only finished in 1952 and the Seventh Series
maps using the data were first published in 1962. Now OS uses metric map scales — 1:1250 and 1:2,500 for Land
Registry and planning purposes, 1:25,000 (Explorer series) and 1:50,000 (Landranger series) for generl mapping.
Two new developments are widely available custom-made maps centered on any given location and the use of the earth-orbiting
satellites of the Global Positioning Network for surveying. Since 1998, Ordnance Survey has set up around 160 Active Network
Stations all over the UK.
Colour printing arrives
By the end of the nineteenth century, colour printing had begun and was successfully
applied to maps by John Bartholomew. His son, John George Bartholomew (b 1860), a founding member of the Royal Scottish
Geographical Society, and later appointed Cartographer to King George V, included both colour-printed maps and town plans
in his Royal Atlas of England and Wales around 1895. The pages measure about 42 x 32 cm.
Charles Booth, a successful Liverpudlian businessman, was minded to
test a politician’s claim that 25% of Londoners were living in poverty. Using Stanford’s 6”
to one mile (1:10,560) Library Map of London and Suburbs and a small team of researchers he set out to
survey poverty and produced one of the earliest examples of ‘social cartography’ using colour
overlay. His data came from reports of School Board visitors who visited households accompanying police
officers on their beats and from the police notebooks. The first survey covered just the poor East End area
of London but he extended it to cover central London and published it in four sheets in 1891 entitled
Descriptive Map of London Poverty 1889. (His results showed nearer 35% lived in poverty).
John George Bartholomew’s Half Inch to the Mile maps were
first published between 1919 and 1924 and are probably most attractive maps of England. This map was cloth-backed
for serviceability and was the rambler’s companion around the Lake District with it’s height contours beautifully
coloured. It measured 52.5 x 80 cm and is reproduced courtesy of the Bartholomew Archive. The Half Inch series was
produced up to the 1970’s
Maps below ground?
The Unified London Underground appeared on a 1908 postcard
produced by the map printers, Waterlow & Sons. It included the Underground Electric Railways of London (UERL),
Central London, Great Northern and City, Metropolitan and the City & South London Railways.
In the Karl Baedeker’s GREAT BRITAIN Handbook for Travellers, 7th Edition,
published in 1910 in Liepzig, was included this map of London Railways.
Harry Beck produced a truly original diagrammatic map of the London Underground,
first published in 1933, which has been a model for similar railway systems in cities around the world.
Sadly increasing complexity of the lines and the loss of the strong vertical element has meant that the current
‘Tube’ map is more colourful but less readable and less memorable. As an aside, Londoners have always
wanted the river included as a physical feature to relate to but twice this has been abandoned and then reinstated.
It seems that the original Beck design approach is still valid today and probably reached it’s peak of clarity
and comprehensiveness in the
1987 map.
It is impossible to leave this iconic map without a mention of the classic
mixed-up names puzzle using it. You may find it easier to print out the Puzzle Page image and study it at leisure. When your
solving power fails, you can print out the Answers Page to check. Only a born Londoner will solve it completely. (In passing,
‘nabk’ is the yellow edible fruit of the spiny buckthorn shrub, Ziziphus lotus, from North Africa.) And for the record the
author has always remained anonymous.
The Streets of London
Phyllis Pearsall’s map is justly famous although cartographer’s
still tend to look down on it because of its cheap and cheerful presentation. Her map was and still is found
in almost every London household. The London A-Z was born in 1936, not the first street atlas but the most
comprehensive covering more than 23,000 streets, mews, squares, avenues and alleys. In addition it was up-to-date,
fully-indexed and pocket-sized. With the help of drughtsman James Duncan, and working from a bedsit in Horseferry
Road as her office, Phyllis had spent more than a year walking the streets of the city researching the map data.
Publishers showed a remarkable lack of interest, so she founded the Geographers’ Map Company and
published the A-Z Map of London herself. Printed in black and white on cheap paper it sold for one shilling (5p in
today’s currency).
When war broke out in 1939, all maps at a larger scale than 1 inch to 1 mile were banned; Phyllis became a civil
servant at the Ministry of Information and, to keep the business going, she published war maps of the various battle fronts.
The classic black & white book continued after the war up to the early sixties. In colour and at enlarged scales it
is still a best-seller today.
New Directions
A whole new world of mapping has opened up in recent years. On the railway theme
this lively map is of the Beer Heights Light Railway, a 7” inch gauge working model, which opened in July 1975.
It’s locomotives are 1/3 full size and it forms part of ‘Pecorama’, a tourist attraction in Devon.
The map is designed for single use within a defined area as it specifically includes information needed by a day visitor.
From a map point of view, it has no north-point, scale or reference grid as all are considered unnecessary for the purpose.
Once a recognised grid was applied by the Ordnance Survey, specialist societies could
use maps to record data. The
Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland
surveys native plants and plots their distribution in tetrads (2 km squares). This is where you can find the native English
Bluebell in spring at the present time.
As a postscript, a completely different view. This is a Venn Diagram showing the
connections between the elements of the British Isles. It is correct for 2016 - as for the future ...
Sources:
British Library English Maps: A History Catherine Delano-Smith and Roger J P Kain, London 1999
Antique Maps of the British Isles David Smith published by B T Batsford, London 1982
Lancaster University Library - Lancaster Historic Maps at http://libweb.lancs.ac.uk/lancastermaps.htm
Dr. Cecil J. Schneer, University of New Hampshire. Articles on William Smith at http://www.unh.edu/esci/wmsmith.html
The Bartholomew Archive is at http://www.nls.uk/bartholomew/index.html
The University of Glasgow at http://www.gla.ac.uk/services/library/
More maps from Genmaps at http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~genmaps/index.html
