Old Pictorial Map of Birmingham in 1730 by Bernard Sleigh - Bull Ring, Digbeth, Aston, St Philip's

Bernard Sleigh was a Birmingham-born illustrator and engraver best known for his richly decorative pictorial maps, which combined historical cartography with hand-drawn vignettes of local landmarks and figures in a style closer to book illustration than conventional surveying. This pictorial view of Birmingham as it stood in 1730 recreates the town before its transformation into one of the great industrial cities of the British Empire, rendering its streets, markets and civic buildings with the decorative, storytelling quality that made Sleigh's work distinctive among 20th-century historical mapmakers. Rather than a strict working survey, it is a carefully researched imagining of the town's Georgian-era layout, populated with the kind of local detail that a plain trigonometric sheet would never include.

The Bull Ring appears at the heart of the map as Birmingham's ancient marketplace, already centuries old by 1730 and long the commercial and social centre of the town. Digbeth is shown as one of the town's oldest thoroughfares, its tanneries and mills marking it out even before the canal age brought heavier industry to the area. Aston appears at the map's edge as a separate parish, still generations away from being absorbed into an expanding Birmingham. St Philip's, consecrated in 1715 and only recently completed at the date this view depicts, is recorded as the town's grandest new church, decades before it became the cathedral of a new diocese in 1905. Deritend and Colmore Row also feature among the streets and districts captured in Sleigh's detailed pictorial rendering.

This pictorial map suits anyone with Birmingham family roots or a fondness for the city's pre-industrial history, offering a decorative and genuinely characterful alternative to a plain survey map. It also makes a fitting gift for a collector drawn to illustrated historical cartography rather than conventional county surveys. It is available unframed in a full range of sizes, from a compact study print to a larger statement piece for a hallway or office.