Old Map of Surrey in 1829 by Greenwood & Co. - Woking, Guildford, Croydon, Richmond

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 Surrey 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 Surrey just as the county's coaching routes and market towns were giving way to the earliest stirrings of London's suburban expansion, recorded in the plain, exacting style that defined the Greenwood survey.

Woking appears on this sheet as little more than a rural hamlet, decades before the Basingstoke Canal and later the railway would turn it into a substantial town in its own right. Guildford is shown as the established county town, its castle and High Street already centuries old by 1829 and its position on the road to Portsmouth making it a natural hub for trade and travel. Croydon appears as a busy market town on Surrey's northern edge, close enough to London to feel its pull even before the railways arrived, while Richmond is recorded on the banks of the Thames, its royal park and riverside villas already well established as a fashionable retreat from the capital. Kingston, Epsom, Reigate and Dorking also appear across the sheet, each a working market town in the county's Georgian road network.

This map suits anyone with family roots in Woking, Guildford or the wider Surrey commuter belt, offering a genuine record of the county on the eve of the railway age that would transform it. It pairs naturally with our companion Greenwood sheets covering neighbouring Kent and Sussex, and makes a fitting gift for a collector building out a set of these detailed county-by-county surveys. It is available unframed in a full range of sizes, from a compact study print to a larger piece for a hallway or study.