This map, dating from 1875, appears on the back of a “Guinea season ticket” for entry to Alexandra Palace, in north London. The palace was recently restored and public entrance is now available to some areas for free. It’s a nice, vintage map, and the use of colour is interesting and attractive, with key parks coloured in and named, and the River Thames drawn with blue lines along the direction of flow. The map is finished with a gold decorative border. It does suffer a little from overlapping of names and lines in places (e.g. around Bank). It shows not only line names (and colours) but also major road names. Angel is referred to by the “Angel Inn” (the tube station hadn’t yet been built – this is pre deep-tube) and interestingly the main line King’s Cross station was called Great Northern station – but the tube station nearby is called King’s Cross. At the front is a grand drawing of Alexandra Palace itself, mc=uch as it looks today, but with the addition of a hot air balloonist above. It states the view is from “Muswell Hill” which is curious. At first glance, looking at Alexandra Palace from the opposite direction appears to line up, while the “back” of the current palace, which faces Muswell Hill, is without the promenade or much of the park, and spoilt by a car park. However, perhaps 140+ years ago it was indeed more symmetrical. However, the current range of rail options to the palace are much reduced – the Finsbury Park – Highgate – Alexandra Palace Station line is closed (and is now the Parkland Walk) while the Stamford Hill to Wood Green link never got built (although it might appear as part of Crossrail 2 in...

The Painted Hall at the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich reopens this weekend after a two-year renovation and restoration. At the entrance to the new visitor centre in the old undercroft underneath the hall, sits this backlit copy of a historic map-style engraving of the Maritime Greenwich complex. In the middle are the two key buildings in the Old Royal Naval College, each with their own cupolas – the Chapel on the left and the Painted Hall on the right. Behind, is Queen’s Anne’s House, now part of the National Maritime Museum complex. On the hill, slightly to the right and sitting on (and defining) Longitude = 0°, is the Royal Observatory. The modern day view is surprisingly similar, the main addition being an unpleasant and busy road running between the college and the house. Only in the periphery to the left and the right, has the modern city developed. The engraving is from the 18th century and is entitled “The prospect of the Royal Hospital at Greenwich on the River Thames”. Its was drawn by Colen Campbell”. It can be purchased in the shop underneath the Painted Hall or at Royal Museums Greenwich. A slightly later version, with an addition of a statue in the courtyard, is in the Wellcome Collection. View from inside the cupola on the right – viewed from the vestibule of the Painted Hall. With thanks to the Old Royal Naval College for a preview visit to the restored Painted...

The John Snow Cholera Map is world famous as the map that identified the cause of the disease, and was one of the first epidemiological maps created. However, a number of other maps of the location of individuals with the disease were produced at around the same time, in an attempt to try and determine spatial patterns and possible causes. The Wellcome Trust‘s collection contains many of these maps and various graphs and other data visualisations of the disease’s spread. Various theories were tested, from postulating the airborne spread of a “mist” of the disease, to looking at the location with respect to the sewer network, underground geology, or simply height above sea level. We show excerpts of three such maps here, all good examples of data mapping in London in the 1800s. Above (source) is a map of an outbreak in London’s east end in 1866, with dots showing each victim. Red lines show the sewer network and areal colours correspond to different rock types. Blue lines show water supply catchment areas and the outbreak source is circled in red. The dot data was likely rolled onto an existing topology/geology map of London rather than the full map being drawn specifically for this purpose. Aside from the morbid nature of the subject, it’s a rather attractively draw and crisp map of London’s extent and major natural features and networks, in the mid-1800s. Below (source) is a variant of the “famous” John Snow map produced in 1854, showing deaths by household, each as a black bar moving away from the street entrance to each house. Also shown is a shaded area indicating a disused burial pit suspected as a possible source, along with the pump that famously was the actual source vector for this...

This lovely schematic diagram was first created in 1939 by George Dow. It shows the three LNER (London and North Eastern Railway) north London networks – radiating out from the Marylebone, King’s Cross, and Liverpool Street/Fenchurch Street London terminii, in a single map. Unusually, the map includes a series of pictograms, illustrating nearby facilities, leisure and tourist activities to each station. Dr Maxwell Roberts (of Tube Map Central) has recreated this map digitally, using a replica font, icons specially created by Doug Rose. It means we have a full digital vector representation of an 80-year-old map, allowing for reprints of the work at extremely high qualities and resolutions. He has also improved on the cartography of the original, making it a strict octolinear map (that is, straight lines meeting at right angles and 45 degrees only) like the more famous Tube map – the original had bent quite a few lines subtly to fit the detail in. The network itself has remained surprisingly intact over the last 80 years, with most of the lines still serving commuters daily. The most notable closures are the Buntingford line, and the Muswell Hill and Palace Gates branches near Wood Green. Several others have converted into London Underground lines – you can see parts of the modern Metropolitan, Northern and Central lines, and the DLR. There aren’t many Greyhound Racing, Speedway Racing or Ice Hockey facilities left, though. An obvious extension would be to adapt the map to reflect the modern north London suburban commuter rail network layout, and the change in facilities and attractions, while retaining the vintage look of the map. You can explore many other original maps of London’s transit networks, at Tube Map Central....

Readers of Mapping London, and Londoners in general, will be very familiar with the striking straight lines of the Tube Map. But you probably won’t have seen this map before, which employs the same kind of schematisation to show London’s now completely vanished tram and trolleybus network (there is a tram in south London now, but it wasn’t around when this map was created). The map, while simplifying the corresponding road network to 45-degree angles – just like the tube map – includes many other details, such as tube stations, parks (with names), towns and suburbs. The River Thames is there of course, and is also subjected to the 45-degree rule. Road bridges across the river are shown and named, regardless of whether a tram or trolleybus crossed them. Some angles don’t work too well – Seven Sisters road for example, is shown as an extremely wiggly road here, whereas in actual life it’s very nearly a straight line – just one that travels at around 60 degrees from north, rather than multiples of 45. Because it inevitably connects with further trolleybus and tram routes along its length, the map has to stay fairly true to real-life. Hence the dizzying wiggles: As this map shows, lovely as it is, the simplicity of the tube map doesn’t translate very well to London’s complex road network. So perhaps this is why the idea almost didn’t survive for above-ground networks, and London’s more modern bus maps (now discontinued) have always used the actual geographical network. However, there is one modern successor map – the central London bus map for tourists (see the third example on this post). Another oddity is that the map is quite “purist” in terms of colour. It doesn’t colour-code the lines – they...

Layers of London, which has just launched, aims to be a platform for geolocating and documenting the local history of the capital. It works by allowing historical facts, comments and memories to be attached to pins on a map. The pins are grouped together as projects, or collections. The map itself can be adjusted, from a standard basemap, to various historical maps of London, including the high-resolution Victorian Ordnance Survey maps of the capital that were scanned by the National Library of Scotland. An ongoing project is also stitching together and orthorectifying (georeferencing) aerial photographs taken by the RAF after the Second World War. This effort, being carried out by school pupils in a number of London schools, is gradually working across London from the east. It’s a great idea, and the project, financed by the National Lottery Heritage Fund and a number of other match funders, has a big team on board to manage the project’s utilisation and evolution. The focus so far has been on building out a modern platform and it has only just started acquiring content, so the map is a little sparse in places. We hope that it is able to link up with a number of other projects that georeference old maps and images of London and allow user-generated historical content – such as Wikimapia, the LSE’s Booth Poverty map and accompanying historical notebooks, Mapping for Change,...

A lot of Londoners are currently focused on the World Cup in Russia at the moment, so Mapping London is taking a look eastwards, thanks to the latest boutique map created by productive cartographers Blue Crow Media. The map is essentially a Moscow version of their London Underground Architecture & Design Map and features the same basic concept of taking a complex metro network, mapping it geographically, and then including, on the reverse, a detailed guide to the most architecturally impressive parts of the underground system, complete with photos and descriptions. The map and guide are bilingual, in England and Russian. The central Moscow area has an inset map, where the metro is shown in the context of the street network. The map data comes from OpenStreetMap. The map is finished in a card wallet, with an “M” cut out of the front, allowing a sneak peak of the cartography within. Londoners are very proud of the London Underground’s efficiency (most of the time) and history, but are perhaps willing to accept that the Moscow Metro is even more ornate than their own, and this guide nicely encapsulates the opulence of Moscow’s mass transit. It is available from Blue Crow Media’s online store. Thanks to Blue Crow Media for the review...

Adam Dant has, for a long time, been sketching lovely maps of London history, culture and phenomena, often focusing in particular on the historic East End. Now, Batsford, an imprint of Pavilion Books, has produced this book, collating Dant’s existing wonderful maps (and debuting some new ones) in single place and adding background information. The book has been created in partnership with Spitalfields Life, a long-running local blog for the area, and is published today. The book is impressively large, each individual page being landscape A3 size. This format gives each map the space it needs on a single page, to allow the detail, often including hand-written annotations and depictions of individual people, houses, cartouches and other embellishments, to come out clearly. The paper is also uncoated, giving a slightly rough, traditional map feel. The overall production quality and presentation is excellent – always critical for a book containing so many graphic works – congratulations to Batsford for taking such care with the production, giving the maps the justice they deserve. There are nearly 50 maps in all, many of whom have only previously been available as fine art works. A lovely graphical contents page (actually run-in across several pages) provides a glimpse of each map, through a circle, for those wanting to pick and choose rather than read from cover to cover. The title hints that it’s not just London that has been drawn by Dant, and indeed near the end locations as diverse as Paris, Rome, Scotland’s Great Glen and Tunbridge Wells get the cartographic treatment too. But first and foremost this is a book capturing London. Themes stretch from slang to Shakespeare, riots to coffee houses and Hackney to Mayfair. Who knew there were so many wrecks in the Thames estuary,...

The Tube Map is a design classic – the straight lines, even spacing and lack of unnecessary above-ground detail has become a hall-mark of metro maps across the world, since it was first drawn by H.C. Beck in the 1930s. Today, the printed versions of London’s tube map include a specific acknowledgement of the creator of the concept, even as the map itself has greatly expanded with the addition of a many new services. However, there was a period of time, between the merging together of various rival networks in central London at the beginning of the 20th century, and the creation of the Beck tube map, when cartographers attempted to show the crowded and complex network in different, but geographically-focused, ways. This map, by E.G. Perman, and available in the David Rumsey Map Collection, was one of the last maps produced, of London’s tube network, before the Beck “revolution” of the 1930s. It was drawn in 1927 and issued the following year, and shows some network simplifications – the lines between stations are shown with simple, gentle curves, rather than capturing the actual wiggles of the network. Stations are shown as small filled diamonds for regular stations, and larger, hollow diamonds for larger ones – when these are overlaid, due to the different colours of the different lines, there is some indication of the connection. Interestingly, and surprisingly, the complex crossovers of the Northern Line, just south of Camden Town, are shown on the map. Connections with mainline rail are shown beside the relevant station with small curly lines, with the operator name written just below them in a smaller text. This being a 1920s map, the classic “flowery” touches are present, such as the sweeping serifs of the font, waves on the...

The Chiswick Timeline, a mural of maps showing the history of the pleasant west London neighbourhood, was successfully crowdfunded and launched last month. It appears alongside a road as it passes underneath a railway bridge by Turnham Green station. A commemorative book, reproducing the work, is available to buy online or at Foster’s Bookshop on Chiswick’s high street. At Mapping London, we love the idea of a community getting together to brighten up a drab wall in their area, particularly when the artwork commissioned is a map! In this case, it is many maps – even better. The mural features 16 different maps, 8 on each side of the road, from 1593 (Norden’s map of Middlesex) right up to the latest 2018 Legible London map of the area (those attractive pedestrian maps you see on totem poles throughout the inner London, and now extending further out). We feature three of these maps here – at the top is a map by William Knight from 1700 of “Towns, Villages, Gentlemen’s Houses for 20 Miles round London”, it shows that Turn(h)am Green has been around for far longer than the tube station which bears its name. Above is a land-use map drawn by Milne a hundred years later, in 1800. This is a historic “data” map, the colours depicting different land types. Showing choropleths and indeed simply using colour at all on a map was pretty ground-breaking 200+ years ago. The many market gardens around Chiswick are coloured in blue, with orchards in green. Finally, below is the 1949 Ordnance Survey “6 inch to the mile” map, with just the River Thames coloured in, which shows that Chiswick never got fully urbanised – the open lands to the south of the earlier maps have simply become...

The Children’s Map of London (sometimes called the Children’s Pictorial Map of London) was drawn by Leslie Bullock and first published by Bartholomew in 1938, the edition here is I believe the original version. All royalties from the sale of the map went to the Hospital for Sick Children in Great Ormond Street (aka GOSH) which appropriately does itself appear on the map. The decorative style brings to mind an older time – perhaps the 1920s, when decorative maps were popular and the Beck tube map had not yet appeared – or perhaps even a map from the 1800s. Despite this, it was likely a good map to navigate by, as it includes most of the street network, and doesn’t distort the geography. A lot has changed of course, since the 1930s – Euston station, for instance, looks a lot grander on the map, as this was before it was pulled down and replaced with a giant shed in the 1960s. It looks more grand than St Pancras even, on this map! University College also gets a nice drawing in, above. We liked also the appearance of the “Cheshire Cheese” on Fleet Street. A pub these days, and back then too, so a slightly curious choice for a map aimed at children, even if it is very historic: It’s a shame also the Zoo doesn’t make it in – the map stops just south of it, but does at least include a note “To the Zoo”. Hamleys doesn’t appear either – another institution that was certainly going strong at the time of this map. The cartography is clear and crisp, with a good balance of style and function. A yellow/red/blue colour scheme is adopted for all buildings and stations, so that the map is...

Songs of London Town replaces street names with song names. The pastel coloured, hand-drawn basemap is overlaid with hundreds of song titles, each arranged over the street that it references. It’s rather a clever idea and allows for the creation of your own song-narrated self-guided tour of each central London neighborhood you happen to be in. The map covers the centre of the capital as well as decent part of the inner city – see the full map pic at the bottom of this post. The reverse, or “B Side” of the map, contains further details on each song reference: You can find the map at Present Indicative. (If you like the style, also see Fictional London, which is also produced by Present Indicative, we we reviewed it recently.) Thanks to Present Indicative for a review...

The Corporate Archives division of Transport for London recently held a short internal exhibition at their headquarters at Palestra, called “Mapping London” and showcasing new and old maps of London’s transport from the archive. Amongst the highlights included this Lego historic tube map. The Lego is modern but the map was one of the last pre-Beck (pre-straight lines) map of the tube network, from the early 1930s. It contrasts with the light-up Lego map of the modern network that was recently installed in the new Lego shop on Leicester Square. I also liked this experimental Braille map of the tube network, from the 1990s. As well as the big station areas with their names written in Braille, the lines themselves have different patterns, a little like physical version of the current black & white map of the network, an adaptation of which was used in this colour-blind tube map. Finally there was a glimpse of a modern geographical map of the tube network I hadn’t seen before. Dating from the early 1970s, it shows the network and its actual relation with the rest of London, and can be compared with the more modern London Connections map. Unfortunately the print was very small and I wasn’t able to capture a good image of it. The two yellow boxes near the bottom indicate the opening of the final section of the Victoria Line, between Victoria and Brixton, which happened in 1971. Thank you to TfL’s Press Office for inviting Mapping London to the...

We normally feature “modern” maps on Mapping London, however this map despite being also known as the Map of Early Modern London, is certainly not new. It was first printed from wood blocks in 1561, the extracts here are from a 1633 edition which has been digitised at a very high resolution as part of the “MoEML” (Map of Early Modern London) project at the University of Victoria in Canada. It is commonly known as the Woodcut Map or the Agas Map, after Ralph Agas, a local surveyor of the time, who had created a similar map of Oxford, but it is now believed he was not involved. Its formal title is “Civitas Londinum”. The MoEML project has also carefully catalogued the building and other London objects that appear on the map – these appear as categories on the map key and can be highlighted on the map from there. For example, a number of the City of London’s many Victualling Houses (aka pubs) can be toggled on and off. Above is Bishopsgate, now home to Liverpool Street Station and the eastern part of the City of London or “Square Mile” (which essentially *was* London back in 1633, along with Westminster, a village beside the Thames.) Below is a larger extract from the full map, and at bottom is what is now Clerkenwell, just north of the City. View the full, high resolution map here. Thanks to Kim McLean-Fiander, of the project, for letting me know about it. Reference: Jenstad J. (n.d.). The Agas Map. In J. Jenstad (Ed.), The Map of Early Modern London. Retrieved June 07, 2017, from...

Welcome to the Mapping London Christmas List 2016! Not long now until Christmas Day – if you are having a last minute present crisis, our list includes direct links, so you can browse, order, sit back and relax in the knowledge that the present selections for your London map geek friends (or yourself!) are all sorted.     Books     London: The Information Capital – The ground-breaking book on data, graphics and maps about London, by Mapping London co-editor Dr James Cheshire, has been recently published in a softback edition and is currently available for the bargain price of just £10.49. See our review or get it on Amazon.     Curiocity: In Pursuit of London – This huge, whimsical and alternatively focused compendium of London was published earlier this year. See our review or get it on Amazon.     Where the Animals Go: Tracking Wildlife with Technology in 50 Maps and Graphics – The second book by James is newly out. Find out, in a series of stories, maps and graphics how animals migrate and move through the world. Yes, there is a London map in it! Guess which creature it features? Get the book on Amazon.     The London County Council Bomb Damage Maps: 1939-1945 – We’re highlighting this one as it’s been a consistent best-seller with readers of Mapping London since it was released just over a year ago. A weighty tome reproducing the detailed, carefully coloured maps of districts of London, showing the damage wrought by the Blitz of London and other attacks during the Second World War. The maps were painstakingly drawn for the London County Council, shortly after the war’s end. See our review or get it on Amazon.     The Great British Colouring Map: A Colouring Journey Around Britain...

Following on from their Brutalist London Map, Blue Crow Media have moved back a few decades and produced this new map of Art Deco London. The map is presented in an attractive slip and folds out to A2. It’s printed on silver paper, which gives the roads and rivers a lovely, sparkly sheen to them. As well as the silver background, the colours used (black, with white station symbols and dark green parks) gives the map a rather unique feel. The map reveals the locations of London’s key Art Deco (1920s-40s) buildings, in red. Art Deco buildings come both the imposing and the delicate. Former examples include Senate House, the chunky building that is the University of London library (and allegedly was going to be the UK HQ for the Germans if they had won the Battle of Britain), and the London Underground HQ at 55 Broadway, which sits above St James’ Park station. More delicate buildings include the gorgeous former Daily Express building on Fleet Street (which has this amazing staircase), and the equally curvy Florin Court in Charterhouse. Oxo Tower is there. Famously, the chimney had windows shaped as “O”, “X”, and “O”, to get around strict advertising regulations of the time. Plus Battersea Power Station also gets a mention, even if it is (temporarily) without its iconic towers. The reverse of the map includes a complete list of the buildings that are highlighted on the map, including the designer, build year and listing status. We really like the silvery background paper which makes the map stand out and gives it a bit of style. The guide is ideal for an art-deco tour of London and will almost certainly reveal interesting buildings you haven’t spotted before, even if you know London well...

As an update to our previous feature on a replica map set of the John Rocque eighteenth century map of London, we feature the Locating London’s Past project. At the heart of the website is a high-resolution scanned version of the aforementioned historic map, allowing anyone to see this 260 270-year-old snapshot of (central) London in wonderful detail, including the individual alleyways and yards (with names clearly visible) linking the medieval street network. The project has “orthorectified” the old map, lining it up with the modern “Google Map” which is also available from a drop down on the website for a direct comparison. Interested researchers can add pins to the map referencing various historic records, such as plague deaths and Old Bailey proceedings, via the Data tab. 1740s London looks distinctly different – it’s much smaller, of course, and while the familiar street pattern is familiar in many places, there are some big changes too. One of the most striking differences is the lack of the Embankment road (for example, in the snapshot below). Instead, streets and yards just lead straight down to the edge of the River Thames, often ending at a flight of stairs down to the water itself. Most of these have disappeared now, the building of the Embankment and modern bridges across the Thames having put paid to that, although some are still intact, including a rather spectacular set accessible just east of Tower Bridge – the Horsleydown Old Stairs, which appear on the map too. University College London was still 80 years off being founded when this map was produced, and the area is shown simply as some small garden plots off Tottenham Court Road and the “Road to Highgate”. Spellings have changed – back then it was “High...

Here’s an attractive map commissioned by The Watch Gallery to highlight some of the key places in London, in the development of timekeeping. From the Old Observatory at Greenwich, to Big Ben, there are many horologically significant places featured here, including some recent location such as the Swiss clock installed in Borough Market to commemorate the Swiss pavilion for the Olympic Games in 2012. The map is appropriately called Winding Streets. It’s nice to see a dedicated map like this, rather than a common (but lazy) way of mapping a particular topic by sticking pins on the default render of Google Maps. A particularly nice touch is the treatment of the parks in a watercolour style, and little features drawn in with a pen stroke, such as Westminster Bridge and fish in the River Thames. Not too much to overwhelm and distract, just the right amount to add character to a map that is telling a story. See a zoomable version of the map here. Thanks to The Watch Gallery for the...

The latest pocket guide and fold-out map from boutique urban cartographers Herb Lester is “Punk London“, celebrating 40 years since the punk movement of the 1970s, by mapping key locations in central London where it happened. Mike Haddad is the carrtographer/designer. As with all Herb Lester maps it’s a proper, custom made and litho-printed map, with an eye-catching pink, grey and white colour palette. Researcher Paul Gorman has done his leg-work and identified 111 locations across the city, marked with black pins, so the accompanying A6 pocket guide runs to 28 pages, with the enclosed map folding out to A3: “Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s Sex shop at 430 Kings Road; the Hampstead flat shared by Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious; Saint Martin’s School Of Art, where the Sex Pistols made their debut performance; Pathway Studios in Canonbury, where The Damned recorded New Rose, the first UK punk release; The Clash’s Camden Town rehearsal space and many more locations associated with all the movement’s key figures.” It’s priced at a bargain £6 from the Herb Lester shop. Thanks to the heads-up from the Herb Lester team. Photos from their...

To celebrate one year since the release of London: The Information Capital by Mapping London co-editor James Cheshire and graphic designer Oliver Uberti, and the book recently winning the BCS Award, the authors have released a number of new excepts from the book. Here we feature “What Lies Beneath”, a map of the tunnelled sections of the forthcoming (2018+) Crossrail line that snakes right through central London. During the archaeological surveys that took place prior to excavating the tunnels, a wide variety of historic artefacts were found, some of which are celebrated in this graphic in the book, along with a map of the route itself and a cross-section of key buildings the line will pass by. From plague skeletons to woolly mammoths, The cartography of the map is very pleasing to the eye, it combines the characteristic “sketch style”, with both the artefacts and the rail and river lines appearing as “pencil strokes”, but forming proper geographic map accurately showing the route. You can, by the way, see how Crossrail will mesh with the existing TfL routes in London on this interactive map (the line line is in purple on this latter map). You can buy the book on Amazon. See also our previous feature on the official Crossrail tunnel map. Sketches by Oliver Uberti with data from...

For fans all all things concrete comes this map of London’s most famous Brutalist buildings. Created by Blue Crow Media (see also their craft beer and cycling maps, it is the first in a new series of map-based guides to London architecture, focusing on the modern 1950s/60s “raw” concrete-heavy designs by Le Corbusier and others of the post-war architectural phase. The map is presented attractively in a blue band which keeps it nicely folded. The font used for the map title and building captions is the classic Helvetica font, used most famously on the New York Subway signs, crops up in all kinds of modern design institutions and is entirely appropriate here. On the reverse of the map, once unfolded, there is a short section on each of the structures featured on the map, with a photo, address, designer, build date and listing info. Blue Crow Media have created a soothing, subdued background map of concrete greys, browns and pale blues, using OpenStreetMap data. They have eschewed road names, featuring instead tube and railway stations, denoted (perhaps controversially) by roundels, as the chief geographic landmarking for the map, along with park names. It’s a bold idea but works well here with the partially translucent red for the Brutalist building outlines standing out strongly. If the Barbican Estate is one of your favourite London places, then this is the map to get to further explore these striking, if divisive, buildings. Buy the map from the Blue Crow Media shop Thanks to Blue Crow Media for the review...

Today, the London Transport Museum unveils a new permanent gallery in its space in Covent Garden, called “London by Design“. The gallery includes a number of maps which have not been exhibited before, including this lovely map of the “Baker Street & Waterloo Railway (of which the Bakerloo Line‘s name is a portmanteau) which first started running in 1906, between Baker Street and Waterloo. The map is a geographical one with the tube network added on to it (Beck’s non-geographic diagrams were still 25 years away) and it was likely intended to show just how useful the new link was, allowing access between north and south central London without having to go east to Farringdon or west to Kensington (operated presumably by rival train companies). I like the cartography of this map – or, at least, of the underlying map by “Johnson, Riddle, Couchman & Co Ltd of Southwark. The colours are nice and simple – yellow urban areas, red key buildings, black stations and blue water features. London’s geography seems surprisingly familiar, 100+ years later. The parks and urban areas have generally not changed name. The railway networks themselves are perhaps what has changed significantly. I never knew for instance that Angel was once a terminus station. Bricklayers Arms station is one that has vanished completely off the network maps. Lots Road, the old power station that powered the tube network, appears on the map at the bottom. Of interest is how the Bakerloo route then added on top in a translucent manner, showing how closely it follows the road network above it, suggesting that it is the obvious alternative to a walk along Portland Place, Regent Street and Haymarket. The original cartographers (not the Bakerloo ones!) have taken care to place their...

Is this London’s first 3D map? The vivid and historic map of London in 1842, coloured by district, has one unusual feature – it’s embossed. The photos here (taken of the copy in The Map House dealership in Knightsbridge) are from the framed copy that hangs in The Map House and the directional lighting from above picks out the relief of the buildings. This must therefore make it one of London’s earliest “3D” maps, and the embossed effect, even if it is uniformly applied to each building and so does not correspond to the actual heights or height differences, helps emphasise that, even in the mid-nineteenth century, London was already a very large place. It was a particularly interesting stage in London’s development. UCL had just appeared, then much smaller and simply called “London University” (N.B. misnamed on the map, as it had actually changed its name to University College, London, a few years earlier). The railways were just arriving, the railway companies punching through the surburbs to as close to the centre as they could, and building great terminii stations. London Bridge, Paddington and Fenchurch Street had made it, but King’s Cross and St Pancras hadn’t and the area where they now are is shown as a simple set of residential streets. The original was folded up into panelled sheets but it is displayed here in its folded out, and framed, glory. The changes of colour for each district make the map a surprisingly lively affair considering its age – the bright colours might not be for everyone but it’s certainly a piece that draws the eye. The map is out of copyright and various editions appear online – but be aware that these are simply lithographic creations – they may reproduce the...

London has a lot of history, of course, and a lot of blue plaques have been erected by English Heritage over the years to mark the locations of its famous people and deeds from times past. Local history societies and borough councils have also added their own plaques, of various colours, so that some parts of London (for example, Bloomsbury with its academic tradition) is a rich source of blue plaques, some rows of houses having several plaques along their length, occasionally even beside neighbouring doorways. Open Plaques is gradually assembling a user-contributed database of plaques from across London, the UK and indeed the world, and there are numerous other projects and books on the subject. One of these, The London Blue Plaque Guide, written by Nick Rennison, is now in its fourth edition, as it attempts to keep up to date both with new plaques being added, but also existing ones disappearing and sometimes even relocating. If you are on a plaque-spotting trip to a London neighbourhood, or simply want to know about the plaques are nearest to you (and exactly where they are) then the London Blue Plaque Guide, coming in at over 300 pages, is an appropriately authoritative guide. The plaques are presented in alphabetical order based on the surname of the person featured, each plaque gets roughly a quarter of a page (there are nearly 1000 in London), detailing the name, inscription on the plaque, and – in almost all cases except for the very obscure – a paragraph serving as a concise obituary of the person concerned. This provides the context and detail behind the plaques, which themselves are typically a maximum of 10 words. The equivalents in other countries, such as the National Historic Landmark signs in the...

Currency and Cartography is an solo exhibition by artist Justine Smith, available to view in the gallery space at The Map House in Knightsbridge, a specialist map dealer (and treasure trove crammed with thousands of other maps, globes, illustrations and other prints – be warned you will get lost browsing in this small but perfectly formed shop) until 10 October. Justine has combined banknotes from countries around the world, cutting them to match the shapes of national borders and then assembling maps of countries, continents and indeed the whole world. As well as the currency theme, Justine has produced, in collaboration with The Map House especially for this exhibition, the print that we are featuring here: the “Whittington Map”, which is a historic map of central London, gilded with 23.5 carat gold leaf along the complex City street network, and the main roads leading to the Square Mile. The streets on this map therefore really are “paved with gold”, as the phrase from the tale of Dick Whittington and his cat goes. The gleaming Whittington Map are available from the Map House in a limited edition of 30 prints, along with a number of the currency/cutout style maps mentioned above. The Map House has so many treasures that we feel a need to feature more maps from them here! If you do visit, as well as looking at the Currency and Cartography exhibits (in the gallery at the back), don’t miss the many globes at the front space, and the lovely old clockwork devices for showing how the relative positions of the Earth, Sun and Moon change – with candles and devices for focusing them into a sun-equivalent beam. And map drawers full of maps – as far as the eye can see. Finally,...

Several years ago, we featured some striking maps from a small exhibition at the London Metropolitan Archive. Each map was a detailed plan of a small part of London, the basemap being from 1916, with individual houses clearly shown. Many houses were just shown in white, but a number were coloured in various colours – showing which houses had been hit by bombs during the London Blitz in the Second World War, and the level of damage. Additionally, circles show the impact locations of V1 and V2 rockets. The maps were annotated with the damage/impact information by the London County Council, the city’s public authority at the time, shortly after the war finished, as a visual record of the extend and severity of the damage. The concept of colour coding individual houses based on an observed attribute is reminiscent of the famous Booth poverty maps, completed 70 years before, although of course recording a very different attribute. The yellow/orange/red/purple/black colour ramping used is clear and vivid. Previously, you needed to visit the archive yourself and make an appointment to see the maps, but now, Laurence Ward, Principle Archivist of the London Metropolitan Archive, has taken these maps, professionally photo-reproduced them and included all 110 in this beautifully presented, large-format hardback book “The London County Council: Bomb Damage Maps 1939-1945“, which is published by Thames & Hudson this week, to mark the 75th anniversary of the first German air raids in London in September 1940. The first thing that strikes you on opening the book is its size. It’s a weighty tome, containing the maps scanned at high resolution and reproduced in full colour, most across two pages and so presented approximately in A3 – large enough to see the individual house classifications clearly. It...

This map, “A Plan for Greater London”, is a 1943 masterplan for the rebuilding and enlargement of London, following the damage of the Blitz. Instead of the Green Belt (which hadn’t come into existence), the author, A. Trystan Edwards of the Hundred New Towns Association, proposed four green wedges, ensuring that Londoners had nearby access to large areas of protected open space, while allowing the city to expand outwards as it needed, without coming to the current barrier caused by the Green Belt. An area slightly larger than the current Zone 1 would be unaltered, while more distant parts of London would be altered significantly. People would never be more than a few miles from a very large area of open space. The map was published in The Builder journal in 1943 and can be seen, with accompanying further explanation, in this report from Birmingham City University’s Centre for Environment and Society Research. For another 1943 London plan/survey, see the Abercrombie...

The London Railway Atlas is probably the most detailed map of London’s myriad of tube, train and tram lines, past and present, that you are ever likely to see. Over the course of 100+ pages, author and cartographer Joe Brown has painstakingly drawn every single track that there is, in London and the immediate surrounding area – be it regular commuter lines, dockside sidings, historical wartime networks (Thamesmead has an interesting past) or even the Post Office Railway, also known as the Mail Rail (“POR” in the extract above). What I like most about the book is not the depiction of the current tube and other networks we have a love/hate relationship with as commuters on a regular basis, but on the historical lines, links and stations that are no more. By way of example, I never knew that Waterloo Station used to actually be four separate stations, with Central Station including a rail link through to Waterloo East, though it was only used for a couple of years in the 1860s: The book is in its fourth edition and is right up-to-date, including the route of the freshly tunnelled (but not yet opened) Crossrail route, as well as the 2018-ish rerouting of the Metropolitan Line to Watford Junction and the proposed (2020?) Northern Line extension, as well as other various tweaks, e.g. that new viaduct above Borough Market. There is not an online version but the style is somewhat reminiscent of the “Carto Metro” map, which is online here, although the Atlas is even more detailed, in that it includes the aforementioned historical lines, non-TfL lines, tunnel status and various information on dates opened (and closed). The London Railway Atlas is a book very much focused on one thing – the most detailed...

From Geographicus, a US map dealer, by way of a tweet by Rentonomy, an article in CityMetric and a collaboration with Wikimedia, comes this high-resolution scan of a beautiful old pocket map of London. Over 200 years old, and drawn by Edward Mogg, it is a snapshot of London from before the days of Zone 2, railways or skyscrapers. Within the built-up area, surprisingly little has changed – many familiar streets and landmarks have their shape and name retained. The most striking part of the map, therefore, are the largely empty surroundings that are now almost entirely built on. Gower Street, subsequently home to what is now University College London, ends about halfway along its current length, with the road network drawn in outline and no houses shown. Camden Town and Somers Town stand isolated from the metropolis. St John’s Wood is a farm. Just to the north of it is depicted the “British Circus”, a proposed (but never built) development based around a 42 acre “pleasure garden” See below for an excerpt of the map for this area. It reminds me of the Inner Circle of the later built Regent’s Park. Nearby, Primrose Hill is shown with hachures, an attractive technique used to indicate hill slopes, which were popular before contours were invented. I particularly like the careful but effective use of bright colours, to highlight the Thames, parks and major streets. Black borders create an attractive “shadow” around building blocks, giving the map a slight 3D effect. The wide canvas creases show that this map was designed to folded up and carried around by the early visitor or businessman. The exact date of publication – 1 May 1806 – is carefully inscribed on the map. The Geographicus page mentions that this was...

Here is an interesting concept by illustrator Russell Bell. He’s taken a pre-WWII (World War 2) monochrome map of the Barbican area of London (the northern-most part of the ancient City of London) and incorporated a modern, coloured map of the main structures that form the Barbican Estate, that was built following the area suffering heavy damage during the WWII Blitz. During the building process, the street layout fundamentally changed, with streets disappearing or changing alignment, and a new lake appearing. By including the modern map as a translucent overlay on the original, the viewer can clearly contrast the old and the new. It’s worth noting that the new is already changing, as a number of the (non-residential) post-war blocks along London Wall, and Milton Court, have already been demolished for further development. Russell has made a number of prints of his map, see his online shop. The Barbican Estate’s multi-levelled structure and maze of “highwalks” means it’s famously being difficult to navigate (which makes it a great orienteering venue), despite various lit maps being available throughout the complex. At one point, famously, orange lines were painted on the ground, to help lead people to the Barbican Arts Centre from the entrances to the estate. Thanks to Russell for the...

This map, created by illustrator/designer Mike Hall (we previously featured his borough maps) is simply called the “Central London retro style map“. It’s a brand new map, but in the style of designs from the beginning of the last century. Mike was particularly inspired by the typography and limited colour schemes used in maps back then, and applied the styling to a fully up to date including the latest London landmarks such as The Shard and even the course of Crossrail, an underground railway line that has been dug but is not due to open for another four years – shown, with other underground railways, as subtle dashed lines. Blackfriars station is correctly shown extended right across the Thames, as it now does following a recent major upgrade. There are lots of nice cartographical details about this map. I particularly like the parallel line effect used to emphasise the edges of water features such as the Thames, and the attractive fonts used carefully for different features. It’s also quite refreshing to see a modern London map which doesn’t use the tube roundel for tube stations – instead, a simple black dot (For smaller stations) and dark grey shape (for larger ones) is used. The muted colours (mainly light orange, light green, light blue and dark grey) complement each other well, producing a map which doesn’t overwhelm the senses, while providing enough interest to encourage visual exploration. We featured a new map in an old style previously – the Wellington Map harks back to the early 18th century. Mike’s style sits between this overtly old-fashioned look, and the latest auto-generated Google Maps and OpenStreetMap maps that we see on our smartphones and computer screens. His map provides a “touch of class” and reassures me that...

This colourful, much adorned map was produced as a fold-out poster on the back of the official guide for the British Empire Exhibition which took place in Wembley Park in 1924-5. The “Empire Stadium” that features on the map later became Wembley Stadium, famous for its twin towers, which survived until it was demolished and rebuilt in 2003. The map was created by Kennedy North in 1923. The flowery writing and decorative style reminds me of the maps of MacDonald Gill, the latter’s cartography of London was beautiful to look at, if time-consuming to plan journeys with. The simplicity of the famous Beck tube map was ten years away from time of the exhibition. Of particular interest is the tube/rail map section, at it shows the Circle Line (or, at least, the two lines that formed it then) as a perfect circle. Indeed the whole map uses curves of varying radii to convey the network in a simpler way than the geographic reality. The style reminds me of the more recent curvy tube map by Maxwell Roberts and indeed my own Electric Tube map which also shows the circle line as a circle. In the British Empire Exhibition map, the northwestern part of the tube map is massively engorged, to show the layout of the exhibition itself, here switching to a geographical map, with the five nearest tube/railway stations highlighted as red blobs. The tube line colours are somewhat different to the modern ones: Green is the Bakerloo and Northern Lines, Red shows the mainlines from Marylebone. The District and Piccadilly lines are Blue, and the Hammersmith & City, Metropolitan/Jubilee, West and East London Lines are Purple. Black is the Overground network. The adornments on the map are most impressive in their number and...

Published in 1913 (and available to download from the Wellcome Library) this series of intriguing maps depict London’s “sites of medical interest”.  It looks like they have been marked on top of a Bacon & Co map of London and they provide a fascinating insight into the large numbers of medical museums and institutions that exist(ed) in the capital. I’d be interested to find out if these maps were available for purchase and who would be buying them – perhaps they were produced to encourage early medical tourism in London. The map above covers central London. But there are also maps for Paddington…Kensington… …and Victoria/...

The Wellcome Image Library contains a number of interesting maps of London that are all free to use. I recently spotted a couple relating to the Great Fire of London. The map above is entitled “Map of London and Westminster before the Fire of London” and was created by P.S Walter and published in 1889. It shows the extent of London prior to the 1666 fire and remains recognisable to this day. If Christopher Wren, however, had been able to implement his plans for post-fire reconstruction of London the map above would not be at all familiar to present day Londoners. The map below, published in 1845 by John Haygarth, shows the “Wren plan” as dashed lines overlaid onto the Victorian street network for the City of...

The National Library of Scotland’s (NLS) Map Department has recently completed a huge georeferencing exercise, taking a set of Six-Inch-To-Mile (1:10560) maps for the whole of England and Wales, scanning them in to create high-quality images, and lining them up with Google Maps and OpenStreetMap modern maps. The maps were drawn between 1888-1913 and so represent a complete picture of the countries a hundred years ago. They have developed a side-by-side tool to allow for easy comparison between the old and new maps. Above (click for larger version) shows the Six-Inch map of the West Green area, near Tottenham. On the left is the old map, and on the right is the modern Ordnance Survey 1:10000 map for comparison (which, surprisingly, isn’t as detailed as the older one!) I wonder if residents on Newsam Avenue (on the bottom right of the extract here) know that the reason for the wiggles on their road is that it runs directly above the now culverted Stonebridge Brook? One other prominent feature that has disappeared, but is traceable by the angles of the replacement roads and houses, is the old railway line, going through West Green Station. Below – Moathouse Farm – a farm appropriately surrounded by a moat – is long gone and replaced by suburban housing, in this part of Edmonton. The modern aerial imagery reveals that no trace of it exists. The scans are of a very high quality and the images have been adjusted to line up well with the contemporary mapping projection. The seams at sheet edges are generally very small and sometimes unnoticeable. This is key to the old imagery becoming a useful dataset for comparing old with new. We featured an older and even larger scale map of London, a few...

John Snow’s map of cholera has become one of the most iconic of an era when the importance of statistics and graphics were becoming recognised. The map above is the one most commonly used as a Snow map example, which we featured a few years ago, but digging around the Wellcome Collection’s excellent image library I have found a couple more. These are in fact more detailed and used at the time by Snow and his (few) supporters to make the case that cholera was spread by dirty water and not dirty air – “miasma” – from the Thames. The map above (click it to load the full size map and record) shows the full extent of the outbreak alongside some contextual information including an (incorrectly) suspected plague pit. At the heart of the map is of course the “Broad Street Pump” which was the infamous source of the Soho outbreak. A second map I hadn’t seen before, although had heard about in “The Ghost Map“, shows the multitude of water supplies that residents of South London were receiving. This is partly why water was hard to prove initially as the source of the outbreak because the mixture of suppliers created a complex geography of cases at the city level. It was not until Snow zoomed in on a small area of London that all became clear… Images CC-By the Wellcome...

London has many networks – roads, tube trains, electricity, water – but there is another key one, one which was very important in allowing London to become as large as it is, thanks to crucial engineering work led in Victorian times by Joseph Bazalgette – the sewer network. A complex sequence of pipes carries London’s waste, and surface runoff water, generally eastwards (i.e. downwards), often ending up at Crossness (south of the river) or Beckton (north of the river). In typical Victorian style, the mundane nature of the facility didn’t stop the creation of carefully tiled tunnels and ornate buildings. Abbey Mills is sometimes called the “Cathedral of Sewage” and has featured in a number of films – remember the Arkham Asylum in Batman Begins? Finding maps of this hidden network is hard. Likely for security reasons (the network is crucial now as ever to the quality of life in London) the authorities do not publish maps. However, glimpses of a pretty comprehensive map can be seen in the aforementioned Abbey Mills, and has been spotted by people who are on occasional tours of the site, such as London Open House. Matt Brown, Londonist editor, took the above (City of London and Bankside) and below (Chelsea and Battersea) photos of part of the map. It is called “London County Council Main Drainage”, and likely dates from the 1950s, which was when the “historic” part of Abbey Mills was in full operational use. (The LCC ceased to exist in 1965). I like the simplicity and clarity of the map. It takes a detailed black-and-white map for its background, and then adds the sewer network in bright, primary colours, and clear, clean text, making whole network very visible at a glance. Blue indicates main sewers, and...

This animation shows how the roads in the London area formed, from Roman times through the industrial revolution and to the modern day. London’s boundary has expanded through the ages, and it’s interesting to see just how small the city was compared to its modern day size, as well as how the collection of villages around the capital developed, often in different waves, before being gradually subsumed into the modern-day Greater London. Protected buildings are show as yellow dots, glowing at the time that they first appear on the map. The work was created by a team, including Flora Roumpani, a Ph.D candidate at the Bartlett Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) at UCL who animated the video, and Dr Kiril Stanilov who was also based at CASA as a Marie Curie Fellow a few years back, as an expert on modelling the development of cities along their networks. The Museum of London’s Archaeology service supplied some of the historic data and Polly Hudson was the director and designer. The video was commissioned by English...

This attractive hand-drawn map, by Adam Dant, is of the coffee houses of the City of London in the 1700s. Adam uses the gradual separation of the two main roads heading east from Bank, namely Lombard Street and Cornhill, to create a map of the area in between them that is, itself, shaped like a coffee pot. Each of the 19 coffee houses on the map has a small vignette about it. The map includes Lloyds coffee house, the place where ship owners and merchants met to spread the risk of each voyage amongst themselves, came the Lloyds of London insurance market itself. I like the colours used – various shades of coffee! The map and information is drawn in a clear and uncluttered fashion, with the links out to each story placed as to not obscure the map. Each story itself is surrounded by an apparent coffee stain. Note that west is towards the top of this map. More about this map on Spitalfields Life. Copyright Adam Dant. Found via Spitalfields...

We were pleased to recently receive a number of hi-resolution scans of some very old and beautiful London maps, courtesy of the British Library, which is mounting a campaign to scan in, digitise and make available to the world online a great many more of the historic maps of London and beyond that are in the King George III Map Collection. Above is an extract from an example from the collection which has the impressively long title: A New and exact Plan of the Cities of London and Westminster & the Borough of Southwark to this present Year 1738 Exhibiting in a Neater and more distinct manner not only all the New Buildings to this Year but also a considerable Number of Streets Lanes & Alleys Churches Inns of Court Halls Hospitals etc more than any Map hitherto published. Whereunto are added the Rates of Hackney Coachmen and Watermen with several other Embellishments.. It has a printing date of 30 August 1752 and was printed “and fold(ed)” by Eliz Foster at the White Horse Ludgate Hill.” The map is notable for the huge number of adornments and other augmented tables, diagrams and information. For example, a key (A-Z style) of all the streets, a separate key for churches and public buildings, vignettes of major buildings, the coats of arms of the many livery companies of the City, the “Rates of Oars” (5 shillings from London to Kingston), “Rates of Hackney Coaches” (1s 6d from the Royal Exchange to Bloomsbury Square), Rates for Coachmen/Watermen, and a short history and guide to the administration and government of the city. Shimei Zhou from the British Library writes: The British Library is home to King George III’s private collection of maps and views which numbers around 60,000 items....

Earlier this week I did a “map swap” with Matt Brown, editor of Londonist, the popular London website. This lovely hand-drawn map, created by Matt himself and the Londonist team, shows a London, or Lundenwic, as it might have been in Anglo-Saxon times (i.e. pre-1066 but post-Roman). Matt has taken a high-resolution scan of the hand-drawn background map and created a digital layer on top for placenames. This means that, as continued research (including feedback from Londonist readers) uncovers further Anglo-Saxon names for the pre-1066 villages that now make up the London area, they can be added seamlessly onto the map while preserving the hand-drawn original. I was really interested to discover that the locality near here at CASA Towers (on Tottenham Court Road) used to be known as Tottenheale. That name has a coincidental resemblance to Tottenham Hale, a station many miles away that tourists occasionally end up by accident when trying to find Tottenham Court Road. The map shows that Tottenham itself was known simply as Tota, in Anglo-Saxon times. Many names are quite recognisable and perhaps the surprise for these is that they were in existence at all around ~1000 years ago, as these days they feel like very modern parts of London – for example, Brixges Stane (Brixton), Cloppanham (Clapham) and Haca’esey (Hackney). Other names are much less obvious – Aetheredes Hyth is now known as Rotherhithe. Giseldone is, I think, now Islington. The map includes the historical (mainly Roman) roads of London, too. Some of these are hard to spot in modern times, but Matt has had a good go at lining these up on the hand-drawn map. And there are many more rivers on the map than you’ll see today – they are still there, but most have...

I was intrigued by this blog post of a lovely looking map of London’s Green Belt, dated 1939. The map can be compared a modern map of the Green Belt created by the Telegraph in 2009. The book that the map comes from is Fifty Years of the L.C.C. (London County Council) by S. P. B. Mais, published in 1939 by Cambridge University Press. It is one of four maps – two more are shown here – in the book. The maps themselves were drawn by Kupfer-Sachs. The book, being 75 years old, is rather hard to track down, but I found a copy buried in the depths of UCL’s main library. Above is “The Growth of London” – like all four of the maps, it is printed in red and orange colours.combined in places to produce black. The map shows a comparison of London’s built up area with its (at the time) much smaller political area and, smaller still, the built-up extent just 50 years before. What I like most about the map though are the little sketches of stereotypes of people in each area, scattered amongst various clumps of trees. There’s the public schoolboy at Harrow, a woman dressed for the Lido in Rickmansworth, a scout in Epping Forest and King Henry VIII at Hampton. Below is another map, showing some unfamiliar London boundaries. The Met Police district stretched to (and indeed beyond) the present-day London boundary, rather than stopping at the L.C.C. boundary. The London Electricity District was even larger. The Metropolitan Water Board area was influenced by the rivers and water catchments, so stretched up to Hertford (on the River Lea) but not south of Crystal Palace. Finally, the London Passenger Transport Area was the largest of them all, encompassing...

This map (full size version) is a plate in “A History of London” by John William Loftie which was published in 1884. It is one of the million images that were uploaded to Flickr by the British Library in December. London’s ancient ways (Watling Street, Stane Street) appear, along with various rivers that are mainly underground/culverted now: Bridge Creek, the River Effra, the River Fleet (intriguingly, called Hole Bourne further upstream – its older name), West Bourne, Ty Bourne and so on. Also shown is “Canute’s Trench”. Green shading suggests woodland while the marshes that form the flood plane of the Thames are left in grey. It’s not entirely clear whether London would ever have looked like this. The city has had buildings since Roman times, and 2000 years ago, the River Thames was quite a bit wider than the near present day width that the map shows. The PDF of the book is here. The first 24 pages of the book are concerned with describing this map in great detail. Part of the British Library’s Million Images on Flickr...

The British Library has launched a portal to let people georeference thousands of historic maps in their collection which have been recently digitised, allowing the map to be orientated to a modern map. There are two sets of maps currently – fire insurance maps for British and Irish towns at the end of the 19th century, and World War I and US Civil War maps. As well as allowing anyone to work on lining the maps up, there is also a page showing maps already positioned and it is from this, that the above map comes. This is one of the fire insurance maps for central London. Each map only covers a small area, but is at a large scale and is full of great detail, and it’s striking both what has remained the same (street patterns and names) and what has changed (the shop types). The one above is of the area that surrounds Mapping London Towers, aka the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) at UCL. Our building itself is much more modern – 1970s probably – but the basic structure, including the mews that the office has on two sides – Howland Mews East – remains. What have changed are many of the shops and businesses. Focusing on the block around Howland Mews East: P.H. indicates a public house, which still remains as The Carpenter’s Arms. But within 100m of the office here, there used to be a vaccination station, waxworks, granary (“Stone & Swansong”), rag store, Great Western Railway Parcels receiving office, two dyers, “oil & color” [sic], cabinet showroom, gold beaters, gilder, blind factory, carpenter, horticultural builder and finally a heraldchaser. I don’t think any of those exist any more. I had to look the last one up, it’s...

This map is taken from an book “The Unification of London: The Need and the Remedy” written by John Leighton and published in 1895. London is split up into neat hexagons, colour-coded according to their proximity to the centre of the metropolis (defined as St Paul’s Cathedral rather than the more normal Charing Cross.) The map is made available as part of the British Library‘s releases to Flickr’s Commons project – the UK’s top reference library donated over a million images to the project recently. You can see all the graphics from the book here and download the book itself as a PDF here. It looks like John Leighton was proposing a wayfinding system for London based on each area’s “zone colour”. Lamp posts would be used, with one handle always pointing to the north to orientate people, and colours, numbers and letters to show the zone. Bus blinds would have multiple colour indicating the zones buses passed through, and taxis would use appropriately coloured lights to indicate where they were willing to go. In a way, the idea of a uniform signposting system across London, across multiple objects and devices, is kind like the London Legible project, only 110 years earlier. The flaw of simplifying London localities into a series of hexagons is that there are six sides, whereas people are used to navigating using compass directions. The six sides allow for a North and South London, but no East London or West London – instead, NE, SE, SW and NW are proposed: What is more odd about this is that London already had its postal districts – N, E, SE, SW etc – defined, thirty years before the publication of this book. This additional system would have been very confusing. See also...

This decorative map was published in or around 1946, as a commemorative keepsake for a weary city and a population that had just been through the Second World War, including The Blitz. It was designed by an artist, Kerry Lee. The map map approximately shows the modern-day “Zone 1” of central London, and is surrounded by vignettes of attractions in London and further afield: The “busy” pictorial design, with numerous colours, gives a post-war London a wonderfully medieval look – even if the bombed areas of London were subsequently built to designs that were anything but old. Despite being a decorative print, it adheres to good cartographic principals, with consistent colours for features, and is approximately geographically correct. Some roads are “obstructed”, however, with shields, people and other ornaments and flourishes. A bit of trivia – the map includes a vignette for Theobald’s Park, which is to the north of London, which intriguingly shows the Temple Bar, a structure which will be familiar to those who frequent the City of London. It used to be on Fleet Street, but, as a traffic obstacle, it was moved to the park for many years, including the time when the map was drawn, it has now been relocated to Paternoster Square, by St Paul’s Cathedral, much closer to its original location, and no longer anywhere near Theobald’s Park. We first heard about the map from geographer Dieter van Werkum. He mentions also that there appear to have been at least two slightly different versions, one with a copyright notice of the “Travel Association of Great Britain and Ireland” appearing the right-hand side. There is very little information available about it on the internet, although are a few bits and pieces to be found – for example it...

Above is a small part of the “Wonderground Map of London Town” – MacDonald Gill created this fantastic decorative map, which was commissioned to provide a distraction for London Underground passengers as they waited for their next train. The map was drawn in 1914, it became such a hit that the aformentioned passengers would sometimes miss their train as they were too busy looking at the map. I love how the map is the very opposite of a network map – how it crams in so much detail in a time that maps were starting to simplify and become more practical and “cleaner”. It’s a map designed to be looked at, not glanced at. The exhibition, where this map is currently being displayed, is “Out of the Shadows: MacDonald Gill” which is at the PM Gallery and House in Ealing Broadway. It is showing this map and others of London, including the bus map we featured when it was at the Transport Museum last year. The exhibition also is showing many of the other maps created by MacDonald Gill, and includes some interesting facts. For example: MacDonald Gill’s brother Eric who created Gill Sans, the clean font which was based on Johnston, the principal font still used by Transport for London. You have one more day to see the exhibition! It’s free, and closes tomorrow (Saturday) at 5pm. More details here. Your author visited the exhibition yesterday (Thursday) and took these photos of the map. It is well worth the trip...

A great new resource has just been released by the Wellcome Library. They have meticulously scanned “Medical Officer of Health” reports for London between 1848 and 1972. These offer fascinating insights into the health of the city and since they contain personal accounts by the Medical Officers and statistical data in the form of graphs, tables and maps. The reports can be viewed online or freely downloaded and will offer an excellent resource for those interested in the past health of London.  Our favourite features are their many maps- such as the one above that shows death rates in 1905. The map, like several we have featured, demonstrates the persistent east/ west split in the health, wealth and wellbeing of Londoners....

Here’s a real treat. The National Library of Scotland’s Map Department, supported by David Rumsey, have taken some very high-resolution scans of the Ordnance Survey 1:1056 (that’s 60 inches to the mile!) set of 500+ maps of London issued between 1893 and 1896 and, crucially, reorientated and stitched them together, so that they can be presented seamlessly (using OpenLayers) on top of a “standard” Google web map or OpenStreetMap, with the base map acting as a modern context. The detail in these maps is breathtaking. In the above extract (direct link) of the eastern end of Fleet Street, you can see each individual alleyway. Much of London has of course changed in the intervening 120 years. In the extract, the printing works have been replaced with banks and other offices, the pub and several of the alleyways (“courts” here) themselves have disappeared, as has the tiny fire station, and the urinals are long derelict and locked shut. Here are the individual towers, rooms and staircases, in part of the Tower of London: Here’s University College London’s main building – with internal stairways, rooms and even wall thicknesses visible. The room in the very centre of the university is called the “Octagon”, and the map (direct link) reveals why: Interesting to note from the map above that the alley that is now known as Gower Court used to be called Little Gower Place. While many areas are largely unchanged from 120 years ago, some places are distinctively different. These days, Kingsland Basin is residential, and renamed “Hertford Wharf”. The warehouses were recently converted to “loft-style” flats, with one-bed apartments currently a snip (!) at just under £500,000 each. However, the Victorian maps reveal what kinds of products were being moved around: timber, cement, refuse, and...

Mapping London has always been most interested in modern maps of London, however we are happy to make the occasional exception, and so when this reproduction of a map that was over 250 years old crossed the desk at Mapping London Towers, we were keen to take a look. The original map was surveyed by John Rocque, engraved by John Pine and first published in 1746. It was the most detailed map of London in its time, with over 5000 street and place names. Modern publisher Old House has been to the National Archives to retrieve the twenty four sheets, take high quality imagery of them, and produce a modern reproduction on four large sheets. The presentation of the reproduced maps is excellent. They come in an attractive card box, which folds out like a book (see photo below) with a short history of the map on the inside cover. The history notes some details of the map’s cartography, such as the inclusion of the infamous gallows at Tyburn. Because the map is back and white, symbols are often used rather than colours, to denote features. For example, orchards and small woods are shown as groups of individual trees, each shown with a shadow. There are many tiny alleyways, most with a name, although the smallest ones’ names are not always readable on the reproduction, which is slightly blurry in a few places. Each of the four sheets forming the map are folded to A5. Each sheet is over a metre wide once folded out. Although the map obviously looks suitably old, it is, slightly surprisingly, printed on glossy paper, which gives it a slightly less antiquated look and feel. You’ll need to trim the edges if joining the four sheets together to make...

The above map is an extract from a reproduction of the “Pictorial Map of London” published in 1938 by what was then known as the “Geographer’s Map Co Ltd”. The map shows, for the central part of London, each individual house, the (pre-war) street network, and the major tourist attractions of the time. The map is an insert in the back of an iconic book – the “A to Z Atlas and Guide to London and Suburbs” which was the first of the famous (and still going 75 years later) A to Z series of maps and atlases, that have been an integral part of London’s mapping history. There is even a special A to Z map which shows the routes of “The Knowledge” that all proper London cabbies have to learn before gaining their taxi licence. A to Z have recently published a reproduction book containing this pictorial map, the complete page-by-page atlas of London, and a number of special maps including a pre-Beck tube map and other special interest maps such as this map of London clubs: …there is also a section on “Places of Interest” in a pre-war London, a list of the City churches, and the detailed index of every street. The front cover notes that the atlas has “23000 streets” which is “9000 more than any other similar atlas index”. The book is a facsimile of the original, with the browned paper, watermarks and stains making it look like a typical 75-year old well used book, but actually being brand new. The book comes in an attractive case, pictured here: Mapping London received a review copy of the map. Mapping London is always pleased to receive copies of interesting London maps to review for the blog. You may be...

The epic graphic novel entitled “From Hell” is summarised in the following way: “An unflinching recreation of Jack the Ripper’s mutilation of five Whitechapel prostitutes in 1888 is the core of this graphic novel. Jack acts as “midwife to the 20th century”, delivering the next 100 years of Holocaust, serial killing and media rapaciousness as he extracts his last victim’s heart.” If reading it isn’t harrowing enough, you can now follow in Jack the Ripper’s footprints thanks to Martin Zaltz-Austwick and Stephan Hugel (two of our colleagues at CASA) who walked one of the routes described in the book and produced the map above. Martin describes the expedition “as a cross between Iain Sinclair and Sir Clive Sinclair”…. It is all part of the UCL Festival of the Arts – an event we would really recommend....

Here is part of a map, The Map of Roman Britain, Second Edition, published by the Ordnance Survey in 1931 and scanned by Bibliographics. The extract above shows the area taken roughly up by the modern Greater London conurbation, along with the surrounding area. The black triangles and circles show known Roman villas and other settlements, while the lines show the main Roman roads at the presumed height of the Roman occupation of Britain – dotted lines show where the road route is not known exactly at the time of the map’s production. The patterns of dots/circles show wooded areas. The eight roads shown, clockwise from the north, are: Ermine Street (sometimes Erming Street), heading north to Lindum (Lincoln). Now the A10/Kingsland Road. A track heading north-east from the Lea (at Stratford) through Epping Forest. A road heading east to Caesaromagus (Chelmsford) and Camulodumum (Colchester). Starts at what is now Old Street, then Hackney Road and Old Ford and maybe Roman Road, then the A118. Crosses Ermine Street at Shoreditch. Watling Street, heading south-east to Rochester, Durovernum (Canterbury) and Dover. Now the A2. A road heading south to Burgess Hill – little trace exists. Stane Street (sometimes Stone Street), heading south-west to Chichester, via Alfoldean (quite near Horsham). Portway, heading west starting along Farringdon Road and Oxford Street, then through Pontes (Staines) towards Calleva Atrebatum (Silchester). Watling Street, heading north-west to Verulamium (St Albans). Starts on Park Lane/Marble Arch, at the junction with Portway, and runs along the A5/Edgware Road and A5183. London Bridge is also visible, the only bridged crossing of the River Thames near London at the time. The next bridge upstream is at Pontes/Staines. The Ordnance Survey has produced several further editions since, with very different styles, but there is something...

The London Blitz, from 1940-1941, was a traumatic event that changed London’s landscape for ever. Until now, maps of the impact sights from the bombs falling on the city, have remained in paper form and have only been available to view when travelling to public archives, or through specialist planning consultancies. We have featured one such map on this website a few months ago. Now, researchers from the University of Portsmouth and UCL, funded by JISC, have released a new website, Bomb Sight, which has digitised the impact locations and plotted them on modern and historical maps. Initially you’ll see clusters of red dots across the city – on zooming in the dots turn clickable and you’ll be able to find out additional information about each bomb and the impact it had on the area. There are three filters – you can view the first night, first week or the whole period. There is also an application available shortly for Android-based smartphones, developed by Geobits, which shows an augmented reality view – you can walk through the streets holding your phone, and it overlays the locations of nearby impact sites on your view of your current street, as it was 70 years ago. The effort to accurately digitise maps like these is far from trivial and it is an impressive example of discovering a public interest in information like this by making it readily viewable. The site received very heavy attention from the mainstream media earlier this week, so we have delayed featuring this map until now, the site is now accessible and responsive after having suffered somewhat from a different kind of impact – enthusiasm – earlier. Congratulations to the Bomb Sight team and I look forward to further spatial data analyses of...

A book, by author and illustrator David Fathers, has recently been published, on the Regent’s Canal. It’s an engaging little book, part route finder, part local history guide, that documents curiosities about the canal (plus its nearby canal links) as it runs between Paddington in London’s west end and Limehouse in the east end, where it meets the Thames. Having cycled along the canal for the last few years on my commute to work, I was interested to read about the various curious objects that I pass every day. There’s just the right amount of information about each thing, and it really brings to life the history and utility of the lands immediately surrounding the canal. The book is right up to date, incorporating the Olympic Park into its outline map, as well as new attractions on the route such as the Towpath Cafe in Kingsland. Its publication coincides with the 200th anniversary, this month, of the first cutting of the canal. What really brings the book to life – and why the editors here at Mapping London are excited about it – is that every page has a lovely hand-sketched colour map showing the towpath along the canal and the surrounding scenery. The extract above shows the page where the canal passes along the western edge of Victoria Park in east London. The maps are both attractive to look at and clear to interpret. Locks, bridges and road links are are shown, with great attention to detail. You can see more information about the book on the author’s website and buy it on Amazon. Thanks to David Fathers and the publisher (Frances Lincoln Ltd) for sending a review...

[Updated] This map of London districts, was intended to be used as a grand “masterplan” of how a post-WW2 London could look. Each district appears as a simplified “blob” with rounded edges – many districts are simple ovals. Specific single “University”, “Government”, “Press” and “Law” districts are all defined. Blue dots mark out the main shopping streets, with town halls marked with larger red dots. The accompanying text reads: A simplification of the communities & open space survey showing the existing main elements of London. Around the centre consisting of the Fort City and West End are grouped the residential communities which are divided into A. the central communities around the West End, B. the East End & South Bank communities which have a high proportion of obsolescent property & in the main are adjacent to or mixed with industry, C. the suburban communities, the major open spaces & industrial concentrations are also shown. Thankfully London has not ended up as ordered and prescribed – and obsolescent – as this map suggests. [Update – Thanks to Andrea Marchesetti for mentioning the below related map, from around the same time and with the same general idea, except with more precise boundaries drawn around the communities.] Scan of the main out-of-copyright map (top and middle) from Urban Realm. Another source. The second map can be found...

This is an extract of a map produced in 1928 for London Transport by Macdonald Gill. He produced many maps in this “flowery” style, including some maps of the Underground network – a world away from the straight lines and diagrams of Beck that were to come just a few years later. This particular map is entitled “The country bus services map” and extends well out of London – this is just the central part, showing inner-city London (the main built-up area at the time) as surrounded by a theoretical city wall, with towns and villages beyond being highlighted with a scroll. There are various annotations, for example “Stanmore Common affords a good view around”: The extract is part of an image from the London Transport Museum poster collection. The image is on display as part of the Mind the Map exhibition that is running at the museum for the next few months – the photograph I took of the map at the exhibition didn’t come out well, hence why I’m using the official one...

The same day that James received a historic picture map of London that we eventually dated to around 1908, mainly based on the appearance of the 1908 Olympic Stadium in what is now White City, we noticed a Tweet from Collins about a new book that they had produced in conjunction with Mapseeker Archive Publishing. The book is “A Guide to London 1908” and has just been published. 1908, of course, being the first time the Olympics came to London, and we are less than two months from the third time, so a timely publishing. The book, the result of an impressively detailed trawl of historial archives, mainly focuses on the Games and includes various prints of Olympic tickets, route maps and rules for competitors and events. It also has some more general London memorabilia from the year, including a list of hotels, bus routes and cab fares, and a gazetteer of interesting places to visit for the 1908 tourist. The highlight for is a map of the 1908 Olympic Marathon route, from Windsor Castle to the stadium, the first time I’ve seen such a map. The map has been painstakingly reconstructed from scratch, based on the old and very much degraded original mapping. An accompaning historic document mentions that a “gun or rocket” would be fired at the 24th, 25th and 26th mile marker. This was the first marathon to be 26 miles and 385 yards, and very much set the standard. Now I’ve heard both from people saying that the marathon was specially extended by 385 yards to finish in front of the Royal Box, and from others that say this is apocryphal. The book has a good go at putting the stories to rest once and for all – it has...

I recently managed to get my hands on one of my favourite maps of London. It is produced by G.W. Bacon and Co. Ltd and dates from around 1908. I like it for its clear cartography, the selection of pseudo 3D buildings (nice to see UCL in there) and the simplicity of the street network (only major roads are shown). The muted colours used add to the uncluttered feel of the map and gives visitors the impression of clear routes to follow between London’s landmarks. Perhaps my favourite aspect of the map is the inclusion of the Franco-British Exhibition and 1908 Olympics stadium (below). You can see that transport demands back then were slightly less than they are now with only two Tube stations serving the site Wood Lane (on the Central Line, now disused) and Exhibition (which I think is now the current Wood Lane). The area is now home to BBC Television Centre and Westfield Shopping Centre (bring back the exhibition architecture I say). I can’t seem to find much information about the map such as the exact date, approximate value, number printed etc so if anyone knows any more please get in...

The image above is a photo of part of a large map of London, created just after the Second World War and showing buildings that were damaged or destroyed in the Blitz. The map is the centrepiece of a small free exhibition at the London Metropolitan Archive in Finsbury, which closes on 29 March. 18 maps, covering the old Metropolitan area of London (i.e. no further east than the Lea Valley!) have been reproduced onto panels and tiled together to create the map. Some other highlights of the exhibition include a wall of photographs of the devastation at Smithfields Market, following a direct hit by a V2 rocket. The map is a dasymetric map, in the style of Charles Booth’s Poverty Map (and my modern update) where individual buildings are coloured in according to some kind of attribute, in this case bomb damage. Black indicates completely destroyed, while purple shows damaged beyond repair and red shows buildings that are severely damaged but which might be salvageable. Green shows sites where rubble was being taken to. Large circles show V2 bomb sites and small circles show V1 bomb sites, although the map is not comprehensive. Looking at the map as a whole (the section above is only covering the Bloomsbury area) it is striking how much more damaged the East End of London was, compared to the West End, and also the huge swathe of damage running through the western half of the City of London (showing up in purple in the picture below) where little was left standing – except St Paul’s...

We probably don’t feature enough old maps of London on here – we tend to go for the latest glitzy maps, but to make up, here is a huge collection of older maps, which we have received multiple tips about over the last few weeks! It’s not specifically London-related, but Old Maps Online, an innovative way of cataloguing lots of old maps, has many of the London area. The website was produced by the University of Portsmouth, with a JISC grant. It uses the Google Maps API, with a custom styling of the background map and appropriately themed controls. As a catalogue, the maps themselves are stored and viewed on other websites, but Old Maps Online shows the bounding box indicator, and the preview of the map, allowing quick and easy viewing. (Note the bounding box often extends beyond the map boundaries, as it is always represented by a north-facing rectangle and quite a few of the maps are not aligned to north.) A “bottomless” scrollbar ensures the list of the maps keeps on going, as you explore. Background map data is Copyright Google...

After featuring many very modern maps on Mapping London thus far, it was a pleasure to hear about the Grand Map of London, produced by a small bespoke mapping company called Wellingtons Travel. Their idea was to produce an up-to-date map of London, featuring the latest City skyscrapers and other modern landmarks, as well as the more traditional “Ye Olde” buildings in the capital. In essence, it is a new map but with a distinctly antiquated look to it. Notable buildings are drawn in an isometric 3D style (kind of like a pretty version of the Google maps 3D building outlines) while other built-up blocks appear as hand-drawn shaded areas. Rivers and parks have similar, watercolour-style detail added to them. The Shard (which isn’t even fully built yet) appears, beside a free-floating and “steaming” HMS Belfast. The overall pastel brown, green and blue shades of the map are pleasing to the eye. Could that be ex-Mayor Boris on his bike near City Hall? The Grand Map of London (2012 edition) is a product of three years of careful work by neo-traditional mapmakers Anna Butler and Taige Zhang and covers approximately the Zone 1 area of central London. It available as a hard copy, printed on cotton canvas and presented as a scroll, in Blackwells bookshops and Stanfords, in London, as well as on the Wellingtons Travel website. There is also a free iPhone app available. Extracts reproduced with kind permission from Wellingtons...

We were delighted to receive a copy of this rather brilliant new map from artist Julia Forte. It highlights the sort of things in the centre of London that you wouldn’t necessarily find in a standard guide book, but might well hear about in a pub quiz. In fact the descriptions of each item, on the back of the map, are worth memorising for the next time you are in a pub quiz team! One example – the reason why a giant gleaming grasshopper is on top of the Royal Exchange at Bank is because this was the family emblem of the exchange’s founders. You can buy a copy of the map, along with lots of other interesting things – ooh, vintage tube maps 🙂 – here. Thanks very much to Julia Forte for sending in this map. Photo below by Gabrielle Ludlow on...

There is a shop in London that I always peer into when I walk past but have always resisted going in as it presented a real risk of bankruptcy. With a couple of hours (the minimum required I thought) to spare last weekend I thought it was finally time to go and look around the cartophiles paradise that is King’s Court Galleries in Fulham. Many of the finds were too good not to blog so I thought I should share them here (I did my best with my phone camera). All my favourite maps seemed to relate to the planning of London. The first, and probably most well-known, of the plans I saw was Christopher Wren’s 1666 proposal for London in the aftermath of the Great Fire. The version above, published by Walter Harrison in 1775, depicts the straightening of roads in the City to create broad avenues and large piazzas. Much of the plan was unfeasible both due to a lack of consideration for London’s topography but also, perhaps more importantly, because people were quick to claim their land (that once contained their home/ business) soon after the fire. This meant the layout of the City remained relatively unchanged despite widespread rebuilding and is the reason why the pre-1666 street layout is largely present today. Moving ahead 100 years, the map above, as its elaborate title below explains, illustrates the improvements to London that were funded by Coal Duties. The changes are shown in shades of red/ pink. One of the most interesting is the covering of the River Fleet, one of London’s best known underground rivers. This map is clearly designed to demonstrate the necessity of taxation so I guess the contemporary equivalent (although I doubt it exists) could be road improvements funded by the London congestion...

A few months back I had the honour of being asked to approve the use of a couple of excerpts from my London Surname Map in The Times Atlas of London. The wait was finally over last week when I received my copy in the post. It is a great book and an essential guide to the city. The Atlas begins with the first mapped representation of London in 1250 and covers a detailed history of London mapping that provides interesting context to both the development of the city and its mapping culture. The Atlas includes detailed information on each of the London boroughs interspersed with great photos and fascinating insights into London life covering everything from its inhabitants (below) to football, and public transport (below) through to London’s World Heritage Sites. As you would expect from an atlas there are may detailed maps (see below) to break up the extensive commentary associated with the topics I mentioned above. I think the Atlas is brilliant book (not just because I’m in it!) and should make a great addition to the coffee table of fellow London map...

As a followup to yesterday’s article on the Soviet Cold War maps of London, above is an extract sent from the Landmark Information Group, which has acquired a large number of the maps. The extract is of a particularly interesting area in the very centre of London – Whitehall – a place which would be high on the list of areas that Soviet military planners would be interested in. The main ministeries are shown in pink, with numbers that presumably correspond to a key. Ceremonial buildings appear to be shown in green, such as Horseguards Parade, while Charing Cross Station, and the three tube stations near it, are also clearly marked. The River Thames has arrows showing it as a two-way navigable river – the downstream arrow shows direction of river flow, the upstream arrow with flights indicates tidal flow (thanks John for the clarification!) For contrast, below is the current OpenStreetMap map of the same area, supplied by CloudMade. I’ve used the CloudMade Style Editor to mimic some of the colours. The above image is Copyright 2011 Landmark Information Group. All rights reserved. The below image is from Cloudmade and is CC-By-SA OpenStreetMap and...

Yes the U.S.S.R. had its own maps of London, and other British cities, produced during Cold War era, i.e. the 1950s-1980s, to be perhaps used either for identifying targets to attack for a future UK invasion, or for logistics and management of the realm immediately after a successful offensive. The maps were compiled under great secrecy but have come to light in eastern Europe, and are now catalogued by a number of websites, first and foremost John Davies’ sovietmaps.com. The above extract, of part of Hackney Marshes and Leyton in north-east London, is from a 1:25000 map produced in 1985, and is downloadable as an example map from John’s website. Below shows Homerton and Victoria Park. The big text on the top-right corner is Russian Cyrillic for “Hackney Wick”. John writes: “Of interest, just to show the Soviet attention to detail, the map has two features not depicted on contemporary (1985) British mapping: tube stations are differentiated and marked with M (for metro), above-ground stations have the location of the station building indicated (for example Leyton Midland Road and Walthamstow Queens Road on what is now the Overground). “But there’s also a mistake. The River Lea is named in upper case letters (ЛИ) just south of Lea Bridge Road. Name in capitals indicates a navigable river, but this isn’t – the nearby Lee Navigation is the navigable waterway. The blue arrow indicates direction of flow.” Fascinating! See also this followup post. Thanks to John for permission to feature the extracts of the map that he sourced and scanned,...

The OpenStreetMap Out-of-Copyright (OOC) project aims to scan in old Ordnance Survey maps of the country, so that they may be of some use when filling in the modern map. The maps have to be at least 50 years old to be used in such a way – as Crown Copyright expires after this time. There is often a burst of activity as new maps are added in January each year. Currently much of London is missing, apart from the far-southeast and the area featured here, the Wandsworth, Battersea and Chelsea area. [Update – the area is grid-square TQ27 and this particular map is from 1947 – see the comments for more detail.] You can browse the current Out-of-Copyright collection. My favourites are the 1:25000 1st Series maps. These have been scanned in professionally and look lovely. It’s fascinating seeing just how London has changed, which is easy to do by changing between the old and modern maps (the links on the right of the OOC website.) Here is a direct link to the map above, and here is a page with more information about the project. Scanned by the OpenStreetMap Out-of-Copyright map project by...

I came across this map of London train lines and underground routes in 1948, part of a guide and travel-card given to competitors at last Olympic Games in London, in 1948, while at an exhibition at Westminster Hall on London 2012. The circle line is highlighted in red and captioned “Inner Circle Line”, while routes are shown simply, with many intermediate stations missing and shown with geographical, rather than just topological (i.e. Beck) accuracy. The main venues of the games are highlighted on the map. 1948 was the post-war “austerity games” and existing venues were re-purposed rather than new ones built, with athletes put up at hotels across the capital. I wonder if competitors at next year’s games will also be given such a map in their “orientation pack” and what it will look like? Some competitors won’t have to travel far as the Athlete’s Village is on the same site as many of the venues, while some will have to head across to Earl’s Court in West London or even all the way down to Weymouth for the sailing...

Using the visualisation technique used by ABC Australia and the New York Times to show before/after photographs of the impact of the Japan Tsunami, below are before/after photographs of four areas in London which have seen dramatic change in the last ten years. Pass your mouse over each image to move the divider bar. Can you recognise the four places? The aerial imagery is from Google Earth and is copyright Bluesky. The “before” pictures are generally from 2002-6 and the “after” pictures are from the recent (June 2010) update. More on the split-screens in my research...

If you lack a sense of direction and resort to writing directions on scraps of paper or the palm of your hand, this glove is for you. It was designed for George Shove in 1851 and shows the Great Exhibition, held in Hyde Park, and its surroundings. I would hate to think how many pairs of gloves you would need for all of London though! [I can’t find a definitive source. I got the above image from here and it is credited to the National Archives in...

Paying to use London’s roads is not a new idea. I have just come across a map showing turnpike gates (tolls) which were like the 18th Century equivalent of congestion charging. Instead of a single zone there appear to have been 16, each demanding a fee. It is unclear whether cyclists(!) and taxis were exempt from paying, or whether the tolls had any effect on reducing congestion! An interactive version can be found here. I have also included a map of the current zone for...