England Maps

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...

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...

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...

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...

The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge did not exist to flatter its readers; founded in London in 1826 by Lord Brougham and a circle of reform-minded Whigs, its...

Worcestershire was among the English counties John Speed surveyed for The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine, published in 1611 and engraved, like the rest of the atlas, by...

Charles Booth is best remembered today for the poverty maps that colour-coded London street by street between 1889 and 1903, but his enormous survey of the capital, published as Life...

Macdonald Gill spent much of his career designing maps that were meant to be looked at as much as read, and his map of agriculture and fisheries in England and...

John Speed's map of Bedfordshire first appeared in 1611 as part of The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine, the atlas that established him as England's foremost county cartographer...

Unlike the grand decorative atlases of the Victorian era, this map of east-central London from around 1900 belongs to a much more workaday tradition: the commercially produced street plan, the...

Leslie George Bullock made his name in the early twentieth century as a designer of decorative historical maps, working for the Edinburgh firm of John Bartholomew & Son as well...

When John Tallis issued his plan of London in 1851, he timed it to the exact moment the world was watching the city: the Great Exhibition had just opened its...

Pictorial maps enjoyed a real vogue in Britain in the decades either side of the Second World War, sold as souvenirs and decorative pieces rather than as tools for navigation,...

Samuel Lewis built his publishing business around an enormous reference project, the Topographical Dictionary of England, which set out to describe every city, town, and parish in the country along...

This sheet holds a genuinely unique place in the history of English cartography: it is the first printed map ever made of Essex as a standalone county, produced by Christopher...

This sheet belongs to the same series of large-scale London district maps that Edward Stanford's Charing Cross firm was producing throughout the 1860s, each one covering a different slice of...

Herman Moll arrived in London from continental Europe in the late seventeenth century and built a career as one of the most prolific engravers and publishers of maps in early...

By 1862 the district covered by this Stanford sheet had become one of the most visited corners of London, thanks entirely to a single building: the Crystal Palace, dismantled after...

Edward Stanford opened his map and chart business near Charing Cross in 1853 and within a decade had built it into the leading map-selling and publishing house in London, a...

Joan Blaeu inherited the great Amsterdam mapmaking business founded by his father Willem and pushed it to its most spectacular expression in the Atlas Maior, a multi-volume world atlas published...

George Woolworth Colton ran one of the most successful American map-publishing houses of the nineteenth century, and his firm's general atlases were a staple of libraries, schools, and businesses across...

Christopher Greenwood built his cartographic reputation not by copying earlier surveys but by sending his own teams of surveyors out across England's counties with theodolites and chains, determined to outdo...

By the middle of the nineteenth century, Liverpool had grown into the busiest port outside London, a position confirmed in the same year, 1851, that the publisher John Tallis issued...

Between 1741 and 1745, the surveyor John Rocque and the engraver John Pine carried out one of the most ambitious mapping projects of the eighteenth century: a plan of London,...

What sets Joan Blaeu's map of Kent apart from the English county maps it was based on is the sheer decorative ambition of the Amsterdam workshop that produced it. Issued...

The West Riding of Yorkshire was already one of England's busiest manufacturing regions when Joan Blaeu's workshop in Amsterdam engraved this map for his Atlas Maior, first issued in 1662...

By 1822, London was expanding faster than any city in Europe, swallowing villages and market gardens on every side of the old City and Westminster. It was this restless growth...

John Cary earned a reputation as the finest engraver of county maps working in Georgian London, and his 1807 map of Norfolk shows exactly why. It was engraved for Cary's...

By 1881, when A.K. Johnston published this railway map of England and Wales, the country's rail network had reached its Victorian peak, a dense mesh of competing companies criss-crossing every...

John Speed included this map of Lancashire in his Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine, published in 1611 and widely regarded as the first county atlas of England and...