Old Map of Kent in 1844 by Samuel Lewis - Ashford, Royal Tunbridge Wells, Maidstone, Gillingham, Margate

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 of the age's appetite for orderly, factual reference works, cataloguing every parish and town in the county with a precision that owed little to the decorative antiquarian atlases of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The map it produced for Kent shows a county being reshaped by two forces at once: fashionable leisure travel on one hand, and the railway on the other.

Tunbridge Wells, known today as Royal Tunbridge Wells, had risen from a single mineral spring discovered in 1606 into one of England's most fashionable spa towns, its Pantiles promenade drawing visitors through the eighteenth century and well into the Victorian era. Ashford, by contrast, stood on the cusp of a very different future, its position on the newly opened South Eastern Railway line marking it out for the locomotive works and railway town it would soon become. Maidstone appears as the established county town on the River Medway, Gillingham sits within the Medway towns further downstream, and Margate is recorded as one of the earliest and most popular seaside bathing resorts on the Kent coast.

This edition suits readers interested in Kent's Georgian and Victorian social history, from spa culture to the arrival of the railway. The plate is reproduced at high resolution from an original 1844 print and available in several sizes. It sets the county's fashionable resorts against its emerging railway towns, a contrast the store's earlier Kent maps do not attempt to draw.