Old Map of London and Environs in 1822 by Thompson - Isle of Dogs, Bermondsey, Deptford, Covent Garden, Westminster

By 1822, London was expanding faster than any city in Europe, swallowing villages and market gardens on every side of the old City and Westminster. It was this restless growth that the engraver Thompson set out to capture in his New Map of London and its Environs, published that year by the firm of Reeves & Hoare. The map was drawn from an original survey stretching some eight miles east to west and six and a quarter miles north to south, a scope wide enough to catch the docks rising along the Thames, the terraces spreading across Marylebone and Islington, and the market gardens of the southern suburbs not yet built over. Hand-coloured in the manner typical of the period, it belongs to a wave of practical London plans produced for the merchants, surveyors, and new arrivals of Regency England who needed to make sense of a city changing month by month.

At the heart of the map sit Covent Garden and Westminster, the twin centres of trade and government that anchored London's West End, while the map's eastern reach takes in the Isle of Dogs, its new West India Docks still recently cut from the marshland, and the shipbuilding yards of Deptford further downriver. Bermondsey appears south of the Thames amid its tanneries and leather works, and the map extends outward to Lambeth, Chelsea, Islington, Hackney, Camberwell, Battersea, and as far as the still-rural heights of Hampstead. Regent's Park, newly laid out by John Nash, and the older expanses of Hyde Park and Greenwich Park are also shown, giving a clear sense of how much open ground still separated the built-up city from its surrounding villages.

This is a rewarding find for anyone researching London ancestors who lived through the city's Georgian expansion, or for collectors who enjoy tracing a neighbourhood's transformation from field to street. Because the original plate captured so much fine detail across such a wide area, we scan it at high resolution, and offer the print across a range of sizes so every street name from Covent Garden to the Isle of Dogs remains legible on the wall.