All Maps

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...

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...

Few surveys in European history were born of quite so blunt a purpose as the one behind this map of County Kildare. Sir William Petty, physician-general to Oliver Cromwell's army...

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...

By the time Samuel Lewis published his Topographical Dictionary of England in 1844, complete with its accompanying maps of Guernsey, Jersey, and the Isle of Man, English regional mapping had...

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,...

In 1573, Christopher Saxton set out under a royal patent from Elizabeth I to survey every county in England and Wales, a project that would culminate in 1579 with the...

Unlike the pocket atlases and folded county sheets typical of eighteenth-century cartography, this map of Ireland was designed from the outset to be read at a distance, as a large...

John Speed was a tailor by trade before he turned to cartography, and by 1611 his atlas The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine had made him the best-known...

1851 was the year London staged the Great Exhibition, and it was for the accompanying wave of interest in geography that the publisher John Tallis commissioned his Illustrated Atlas of...

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...

John Rapkin engraved this map of Manchester and its environs in 1851, a decade after Manchester had cemented its reputation as the world's first industrial city and the undisputed capital...

Pictorial maps were having a moment in the 1930s, and this 1935 map of Scotland is a fine example of the genre: part geography, part storybook, packed with hand-drawn illustrations...

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"...

This detailed map of west London was published in 1862 by Edward Stanford, whose library map of the capital was hailed by the Royal Geographical Society as "the most perfect...

This exceptionally rare map of Lancashire was created by Joan Blaeu, working from his renowned mapmaking workshop in Amsterdam, and was originally published in his monumental "Theatrum Orbis Terrarum sive...