Old Map of Kent in 1829 by Greenwood & Co. - Canterbury, Maidstone, Tunbridge, Margate

Christopher and John Greenwood were among the most ambitious English cartographers of the early 19th century, running a survey business that set out in the 1810s to map every English county at a genuinely large scale, well beyond what earlier Georgian publishers had attempted. Their county-by-county project, funded through local subscriptions, relied on fresh trigonometric surveys rather than simply updating older plates, and this Kent sheet, published in 1829, comes from near the end of that decades-long undertaking. The result is a map dense with the roads, parishes and settlements of Kent just as the county's coaching routes and coastal resorts were reaching the height of their Georgian-era popularity, recorded in the plain, exacting style that defined the Greenwood survey.

Canterbury anchors the map as Kent's ecclesiastical capital, its cathedral already the seat of the Archbishop for well over a thousand years by the time this map was drawn. Maidstone appears as the county town, sitting on the River Medway at the heart of Kent's road network, while Tunbridge, on the western side of the county, was already known for the chalybeate spring that had drawn fashionable visitors to Tunbridge Wells since the 17th century. Margate is recorded on the north Kent coast as one of England's earliest seaside resorts, its bathing machines and sea-air reputation already well established among Georgian visitors decades before the railways brought mass tourism to the coast. Bromley, then a modest market town, also appears on the sheet, still comfortably part of Kent well over a century before it was absorbed into Greater London.

This map suits anyone with family roots in Canterbury, Maidstone or the Kent coast, offering a genuine record of the county's Georgian-era towns and coaching routes. It also makes a fitting gift for anyone who grew up in Bromley and would enjoy seeing it as it stood while still firmly part of Kent. It is available unframed in a full range of sizes, from a modest print for a hallway to a larger piece for a study or office wall.