Old Map of Cheshire in 1844 by Samuel Lewis - Stockport, Macclesfield, Warrington, Chester, Crewe

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 his Cheshire volume paid close attention to the county's textile towns alongside its older market centres, producing a map that looks quite different in character from the Jacobean county atlas John Speed had drawn more than two hundred years earlier. Where Speed's Cheshire was a landscape of manors and hundreds, Lewis's is one of mills, canals and a brand-new railway works.

Macclesfield had grown into one of England's principal silk-weaving towns by the 1840s, its mills turning imported raw silk into thread and cloth, while neighbouring Stockport had become a major centre of cotton spinning, hat-making and, from 1840, home to a great railway viaduct carrying trains between Manchester and Birmingham high above the Mersey valley. Chester's Roman walls and covered Rows appear further west along the River Dee, Warrington sits astride the Mersey on the old road north, and Crewe is recorded at the very start of its transformation into a railway town, its works having only just been established by the Grand Junction Railway in the years around this map's publication.

This edition suits anyone tracing the industrial geography of Cheshire's silk and textile towns rather than its medieval past. The plate is reproduced at high resolution from an original 1844 print and comes in several sizes. Displayed next to the store's earlier Speed edition of the same county, it lets two very different centuries sit side by side on the same wall.