Old Map of Lancashire in 1844 by Samuel Lewis - Oldham, Manchester, Liverpool, Preston, Blackburn

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 land had, within a single lifetime, become the engine room of the Industrial Revolution, and Samuel Lewis's Topographical Dictionary map captured that transformed county rather than its earlier incarnation. Lewis's dictionary entries for Lancashire read less like descriptions of ancient boroughs and more like an industrial census, tallying mills, looms and steam engines parish by parish.

Oldham sits at the centre of that story, having grown by the 1840s into one of the most concentrated cotton-spinning towns anywhere in the world, its skyline already dense with mill chimneys. Around it the map records Manchester, by then popularly called Cottonopolis for its role as the trading and finishing hub of the cotton trade, Liverpool as the great Atlantic port through which raw cotton arrived and finished cloth departed, and the weaving towns of Preston and Blackburn, both closely tied to the mechanised looms that had displaced hand-weaving over the previous half century. The rivers Irwell, Ribble and Mersey, all central to powering and provisioning the mills, are traced throughout.

Collectors interested in the Industrial Revolution, the cotton trade, or the social history of the Lancashire mill towns will find this map speaks directly to that period. It is reproduced at high resolution from the original 1844 plate and offered in a range of sizes. Set against the county's earlier antiquarian editions, it tells an entirely different, distinctly industrial story.