Old Map of London in 1938 by L.G. Bullock - Tower of London, St Paul's Cathedral, Westminster, Hyde Park, The Thames

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 as on independent commissions, and his 1938 map of London belongs to that body of work. Produced in the tense years between the two world wars, when London's past was being packaged for a public hungry for heritage and nostalgia, the map presents the city not as a modern transport plan but as a historical portrait, picking out the sites that told the story of London across the centuries. It captures a particular late-1930s taste for illustrated, heritage-themed cartography that would all but vanish once war reshaped the city only a year or two later.

Bullock organizes the map around London's great historic set pieces: the Tower of London with its centuries of royal and grim history, St Paul's Cathedral rebuilt after the Great Fire, the Palace of Westminster and Westminster Abbey, the green expanse of Hyde Park, and the Thames threading through the middle of it all. Smaller decorative touches - miniature buildings, historical notes, and stylized lettering - run alongside the geography in the manner typical of Bullock's other historical maps, turning a street plan into something closer to an illustrated history lesson. The result sits somewhere between a tourist map and a piece of graphic design, reflecting the interwar revival of interest in England's historic capital.

It appeals particularly to those who collect twentieth-century pictorial maps or have a soft spot for London's interwar visual culture, a period often overshadowed by both the Victorian era before it and the maps produced after 1945. We reproduce it at high resolution from a well-kept original, and it's available in multiple sizes so the historical detail Bullock packed into the sheet stays readable at any scale you choose.