British Isles

County Sligo appears here as Samuel Lewis mapped it in 1844, one sheet from his Topographical Dictionary of Ireland, a work that aimed to record every parish, barony, and market...

John Bartholomew and Son published this half-inch map of Glasgow and the Firth of Clyde in 1901, part of the layered-relief series that made the Edinburgh firm the standard mapmaker...

William Faden drew this map of Great Britain in 1801, near the peak of a career that saw him appointed Geographer to King George III and established as one of...

John Tallis and John Rapkin produced this map of Aberdeen in 1851 for Tallis's Illustrated Atlas series, a Victorian publishing venture known for wrapping detailed city plans in a border...

Few maps carry as much historical weight as this one: Sir William Petty's map of Ireland, published in 1685 and built from survey work he had completed decades earlier as...

Samuel Lewis published this map of County Meath in 1844 as part of his Topographical Dictionary of Ireland, a project that set out to catalogue every parish, barony, and market...

This map of County Down was originally published in 1685 by Sir William Petty, based on his Down Survey of Ireland, the first ever detailed land survey carried out on...

This finely detailed map of Glasgow was published in 1851 by the Victorian map publishers Tallis and Rapkin, at a time when the city was rapidly expanding into one of...

This historical map of Somerset was compiled by Samuel Lewis in 1844, part of the wider tradition of detailed topographical surveys Lewis became known for through his influential "Topographical Dictionary"...

Unveil the storied layers of York with this captivating pictorial map, presenting a city shaped by Roman foundations, Viking invasions, and medieval ambitions. Charming illustrations highlight ancient walls that once...

Witness London on the cusp of the 19th century with this 1806 Map, capturing a metropolis abuzz with commercial bustle and aristocratic taste. The Thames winds between key quarters, from...

This vintage map of Birmingham, England, showcases the city’s urban layout as it was in the 19th century, providing a detailed glimpse into one of the UK’s most historic industrial...

This detailed city map of Oxford is from around 1910 in the Edwardian era, offering a charming glimpse of the famous “City of Dreaming Spires.” It was produced by the...

Travel back to mid-19th century Scotland with this beautifully detailed 1851 map, which captures the intricate geographical and administrative divisions of the region. This map provides a comprehensive view of...

Journey into the early 19th century with this ethnographic map of the British Isles, crafted circa 1810 to reveal the intricate tapestry of regional cultures and historical boundaries. Detailed county...

Compiled for John Speed's 1611 Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine, the first printed atlas devoted entirely to England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales, the Gloucestershire sheet stands out even...

Long before Croydon, Richmond and Kingston were transferred into Greater London under the London Government Act of 1965, they belonged firmly within Surrey, and this map of the county, engraved...

The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge commissioned this plan of Dublin from William Barnard Clarke, an architect and cartographer who produced several city plans for the Society alongside...

First engraved in 1611 for John Speed's Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine, the earliest atlas to map England and Wales county by county, this sheet shows Berkshire as...

Drawn as a bird's-eye view rather than a plan seen from directly above, this print reproduces the Edinburgh plate from Georg Braun and Frans Hogenberg's Civitates Orbis Terrarum, the six-volume...

Few atlases changed the shape of commercial map publishing as decisively as Abraham Ortelius's Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, first issued in Antwerp in 1570 and generally credited as the first modern...

Amsterdam's Blaeu printing house was, by the mid-seventeenth century, the largest and best-equipped map publisher in Europe, and it is this workshop's engraving of Cornwall, titled Cornubia sive Cornwallia, that...

North of the old City wall, where Moor Fields once lay open and marshy before draining and building over the site, sheet E1 of John Rocque's 1746 survey of London...

By the 1740s the fields north of Soho were fast disappearing under new streets and squares, and sheet B1 of Rocque's survey is where that transformation shows most clearly. Positioned...

Devon's long double coastline, facing both the Bristol Channel and the English Channel, gave the county an outsized place in England's maritime history, and this 1665 map by Joan Blaeu...

Two very different landscapes meet on this map of Gloucestershire, engraved in 1665 by Joan Blaeu from his Amsterdam workshop for the English volume of his Atlas Novus. To the...

This edition of John Speed's 1611 map of Cambridgeshire returns to the same engraved plate the county is known for, presented here in a softer, wash-toned palette rather than the...

Few sheets in Rocque's twenty-four-part survey capture a single trade as clearly as sheet F1, drawn across the Huguenot weaving district that grew up around Spitalfields in the decades before...

Sussex appears on this 1665 plate as a long coastal county stretching between the Weald and the Channel, engraved by Joan Blaeu's workshop for his Atlas Novus alongside the rest...

Joan Blaeu's Amsterdam workshop engraved this map of Hampshire for inclusion in the Atlas Novus, the great multi-volume survey of the world's countries that made the Blaeu name famous across...

Sheet E2 of Rocque's great survey sits directly over the ancient crossing point of the Thames, where London Bridge had carried traffic between the City and Southwark for six centuries...

Where the Thames narrows past the Tower of London, John Rocque's 1746 survey turns to record one of the busiest working stretches of river in England. This sheet, F2 in...

Sheet D2 of John Rocque's 1746 survey of London sits along the working edge of the City, where the built-up streets north of the Thames give way to wharves, stairs...

An oddity of the historic county of Lancashire is that its boundary once reached north across Morecambe Bay to take in a detached block of the Lake District, and John...

For close to four centuries, officials and antiquarians disagreed over whether Monmouthshire properly belonged to Wales or to England, an argument that began when the Laws in Wales Acts of...

Stretching from the Great Glen to the North Sea coast, this 1690 map takes in a wide cross-section of north-east Scotland, published by the Amsterdam partnership of Gerard Valk and...

Staffordshire packed an unusual range of industry and history into one county, and this map was bound into the atlas accompanying Samuel Lewis's Topographical Dictionary of England, a gazetteer that...

Munster appears on this 1665 map under its Latin name, Momonia, a label typical of the classical polish that the Amsterdam publisher Joan Blaeu brought to his Atlas Novus, a...

Amsterdam, rather than Edinburgh or London, was where much of Scotland's coastline first reached print in reliable detail, and this 1690 map of the Hebrides was issued by the Dutch...

Few reference works of the early Victorian period were as ambitious as Samuel Lewis's Topographical Dictionary of England, a county-by-county gazetteer that ran through seven editions between 1831 and 1848,...

This pictorial map of Somerset belongs to a short-lived but well-loved series that the illustrator Ernest Clegg produced for the Women's Land Army Benevolent Fund in the years immediately after...

Edward Stanford built his reputation as the pre-eminent map publisher of Victorian London, and this sheet comes from his ambitious Library Map of London, issued in 1862 across twenty-four sheets...

Two very different kinds of Victorian ambition meet on this 1844 map of Kent. Samuel Lewis's Topographical Dictionary of England, from which this plate is drawn, was itself a product...

John Rocque's great survey of London ran to twenty-four separate sheets, together forming one of the largest and most detailed city plans produced anywhere in the eighteenth century, and Sheet...

Long before Trafalgar or the ironclads of the Victorian navy, the Royal Navy's fighting ships were built, repaired and laid up along the River Medway, and it is that maritime...

Silk, not cotton, runs through much of this 1844 map of Cheshire. Samuel Lewis compiled his Topographical Dictionary of England as a working reference for a rapidly industrialising country, and...

By 1844 Lancashire had already remade itself twice over. The county that John Speed and Willem Blaeu had mapped in earlier centuries as a landscape of market towns and grazing...

Samuel Lewis built his reputation on thoroughness rather than decoration. His multi-volume Topographical Dictionary of England, first issued in the 1830s and revised through the 1840s, set out to describe...

Somewhere between a wall chart and a storybook sits the Story Map of Scotland, issued in 1935 by the Chicago firm Colortext Publications as part of a series of pictorial...

By the time Sir William Petty's Irish county maps reached print in 1685, the fieldwork behind them was already three decades old. Petty had directed the Down Survey of the...