Amsterdam Map 1870 SDUK Town Plan Print with Building Views - Westerkerk, Zaandam, Ouderkerk, Noorderkerk

This is a highly detailed town plan of Amsterdam from the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, published in London about 1870, with abundant depictions of the important buildings in the city. The map is oriented with the top to the northeast, which brings out the symmetry of the canaled city. The catalog calls it one of the best town plans of Amsterdam published in a commercial nineteenth-century atlas. The sheet shows roads, ports, canals, important buildings, parks and ramparts, and it is the sort of plan that a visitor could use to find the way from church to harbor. It is a fine town plan to study with a magnifying glass, since the fourteen drawn buildings and the inset add layers of detail around the central map of canals.

An inset map depicts the surroundings of Amsterdam, with Zaandam and Ouderkerk among the places shown, and fourteen important buildings of the city are drawn along the bottom of the map, some of which still stand. Many churches are shown, among them the Westerkerk, the Noorderkerk and the Lutheran church, and a Zuyder Kerk is named as well. After the end of the Napoleonic wars the long decline of Amsterdam began to reverse, and the city remained an important center of trade for the rest of the century. The plan therefore shows a harbor town in recovery, with its seventeenth-century canal ring still the heart of the city.

A traveler who knows the canals, a family with roots in Amsterdam, or a collector of Victorian city plans will find a lasting gift here. TheMapVault's Meyer plan of 1844 shows the same city in a German edition, whereas this sheet is the English plan of about 1870 with its fourteen building views. Like every print in the collection, it ships unframed and is available in a full range of sizes, from a compact desk piece to a large-format statement print.