Old Map of Essex in 1831 by Greenwood & Co. - Southend, Colchester, Chelmsford, Romford, Brentwood

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 like Cary or Speed had attempted. Their county-by-county project, funded through local subscriptions, relied on fresh trigonometric surveys rather than simply updating older plates, and this Essex sheet, published in 1831, comes from near the end of that decades-long undertaking. The result is a map dense with the roads, parishes and settlements of Essex just as the county sat on the edge of the railway age, still overwhelmingly agricultural but increasingly linked to London by improved turnpike roads.

Colchester anchors the map as Britain's oldest recorded town, founded by the Romans as Camulodunum and briefly the first capital of Roman Britain before Londinium eclipsed it. Chelmsford appears as the county town, a market centre on the road north from London, while Romford is shown as a bustling market town famous for its cattle market rather than the London suburb it later became. Southend, marked here only as a small emerging resort, had yet to develop into the seaside town that would draw day-trippers by rail later in the century. Brentwood sits on the old coaching route out of London, a natural stopping point for travellers heading into Essex, and Dagenham appears as little more than a scattered village, a full century before the Ford motor works would transform it. Basildon, too, is shown as a modest rural hamlet, decades before its designation as a post-war new town.

This map suits anyone with family roots in the Essex market towns of Chelmsford, Romford or Colchester, offering a genuine picture of the county before London's growth and the railways reshaped so much of it. It also makes a fitting gift for someone who grew up in a village like Dagenham or Basildon and would appreciate seeing it as open countryside long before later development. It is available unframed in a full range of sizes, from a modest print for a hallway to a larger piece for a study or office wall.