Old Map of Surrey in 1801 by John Cary - Guildford, Haslemere, Reigate

John Cary was one of the most trusted commercial engravers working in London around 1800, known for the plain, exacting linework he brought to his county surveys after years producing itineraries and road books for English travellers. This map of Surrey was engraved and published by Cary in 1801 as part of his run of English county plates, each one surveyed and drawn to a consistent standard rather than copied wholesale from older sources, as many rival publishers still did at the time. Surrey sits in South East England, directly southwest of the capital, and in Cary's day it was reckoned among the historical counties ringing London rather than a part of it, with the Thames marking its northern edge on the sheet. The map traces the county's turnpike roads and scattered villages just before the nineteenth century began reshaping Surrey's countryside, giving a plain, legible record of a landscape that within a few decades would start filling in with commuter towns feeding the growing city to the north.

Guildford anchors the map on its main road corridor, already a substantial county town with its castle and guildhall long established by 1801, while Haslemere sits out toward the Hampshire border in the wooded, hillier country of the Surrey Weald. Reigate appears on its own turnpike route east of Guildford, close to the sandstone ridge separating the Weald from the North Downs, and Dorking lies nearby at the foot of Box Hill, in the parish that would later become home to Denbies, now England's largest single vineyard. Streatham, then still a village rather than a London suburb, sits at the map's northern edge close to the Thames-side boundary Cary drew between Surrey and the capital, a line that would move substantially only after 1965 when the newly formed London Boroughs absorbed a swathe of what this map shows as open Surrey countryside. Smaller lanes and parish boundaries thread between these places, recording the rural pattern of the county before the railways and later building booms changed it for good.

A print like this makes a fitting gift for anyone with family roots around Guildford, Reigate or Dorking who wants a genuine record of the county as their ancestors would have known it, long before its northern parishes became part of Greater London. It is available unframed in a full range of sizes to suit anywhere from a study wall to a stairwell. Surrey collectors should note this is one of two Surrey sheets we carry alongside the same county drawn by Samuel Lewis in 1844, and both stand apart from our earlier 1611 Surrey map by John Speed: together the three span the Elizabethan, Georgian and Victorian mapping of the same county, so this 1801 Cary edition is best read as the middle of that sequence, capturing Surrey between Speed's era and the fuller, more industrial Surrey later mapped by Lewis.