Mapping out London’s history

11:10am Tuesday 27th November 2007

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A set of historical maps of London gives people a chance to explore the city at key moments in its development. Reporter JON CHEETHAM finds out more.

COMPARING historical maps with modern ones has always proved very difficult because of differences in scale and coverage.

The quality of the reproductions of some old maps doesn't help anyone who wishes to look closely for specific streets or hidden corners.

A special edition box set of four London maps from different eras solves this problem by matching historical maps of the city with present day scales used on Ordnance Survey maps.

Cassini Maps - a company which specialises in publishing new editions of historical maps - has produced the maps at an enlarged scale to suit present-day cartography.

Each of the four maps of London - made at different eras throughout its rich and fascinating history - cover the whole city on one sheet at the 1:50,000 scale of Ordnance Survey maps.

Penny Locke, Cassini's development co-ordinator, said: "We were often asked what plans we had for maps specifically focused on London.

"This comparative 1:50,000 series seemed the ideal place to start, as no-one has ever done this before.

"These maps make fascinating gifts for anyone interested in London's history."

Cassini have added blue grid lines to the historic maps to match the national grid references which appear on modern maps, to aid comparison between the old and new.

Comparing the maps reveals the story about how London's many villages were engulfed by the expansion of the city, which was the most populous in the world at the time when the maps were originally made.

In the historical overview which accompanies the 19th-century maps, written by Alex Werner, a historian at the Museum of London, London Wall, we learn about the birth of the "metropolis".

Mr Werner writes: "Only Peking (now Beijing) had more inhabitants at the start of the 19th Century, but London was to overtake it by the 1830s.

"Its population had reached 2.4 million by the middle of the century, making it by far the world's largest urban area and six times as large as Liverpool, then the next largest city in Britain.

"By this time, the word "metropolis" was being used to describe London so as to distinguish it from a mere city."

Spanning the years of the Industrial Revolution, the maps also create a picture of a rapidly changing landscape - marked by the growth of the railways, the development of the docklands, the urban sprawl into the suburbs and the formalisation of the road network.

The four maps give a bird's eye view of the capital at the height of its expansion.

They cover an identical area extending from Enfield Lock to Purley, and from Southall to Bexley - roughly the area defined by the M25.

Altogether the maps span almost 150 years - each exploring a crucial period in our capital's recent history.

Two of the maps reflect the capital in the 19th Century.

One covers the late Georgian period from 1805 to 1822 and the second is from the late Victorian imperial heyday between 1897 and 1898 when London was the largest city in the world.

The other two maps are 20th-century - from the dawn of the motoring age between 1919 and 1922 and from the post-war reconstruction period between 1945 and 1948.

Cassini's Historical Maps of London Box Set is available from bookshops, selected museum shops or directly from cassinimaps.com