Old Map of Sussex in 1665 by Joan Blaeu - Worthing, Brighton, Eastbourne, Bognor Regis

Sussex appears on this 1665 plate as a long coastal county stretching between the Weald and the Channel, engraved by Joan Blaeu's workshop for his Atlas Novus alongside the rest of England's counties. The map's decorative border and hand-applied colour place it firmly in the Dutch Golden Age tradition of cartography, where accuracy and ornament were expected to sit side by side on the same sheet.

The South Downs run across the map as a band of open chalk grazing land, long given over to sheep farming, while the Weald to the north is marked with the scattered furnaces and hammer ponds of Sussex's once-dominant iron industry, a trade that had supplied cannon and shot to the crown for generations before cheaper coal-fired ironworks in the north began to draw the business away. Along the coast, the fishing settlement later known as Brighton appears under its older name of Brighthelmstone, decades before its transformation into a fashionable resort, with Worthing, Bognor and Eastbourne marked as smaller coastal villages rather than the towns they later became. Crawley sits inland on the road between London and the coast, already a recognised staging point for travellers.

Shown here as a single sheet rather than split into east and west, Sussex is captured whole, its parish boundaries and market towns rendered in fine detail. The print makes a welcome housewarming or anniversary gift for a coastal home from Worthing to Eastbourne, or any collector drawn to the county's iron-working past.