Old Map of Norfolk in 1665 by Joan Blaeu - Norwich, Great Yarmouth, King's Lynn, Swaffham, Fakenham

This map of Norfolk was published in 1665 by the Amsterdam cartographer Joan Blaeu, part of his Theatrum Orbis Terrarum Sive Atlas Novus, one of the defining atlases of the Dutch Golden Age of mapmaking. Blaeu's workshop produced maps of a decorative quality rarely matched by English publishers of the period, using English surveys as their source material but engraving and hand-colouring them in Amsterdam with the ornamental borders and cartouches typical of Dutch atlas work. This Norfolk sheet gives a mid-17th-century view of the county and its place within the wider region of East Anglia, a genuinely scarce survival from an era when full-colour county maps of this standard were produced only in limited numbers.

Norwich appears as one of England's most substantial provincial cities, its cathedral long since established as a centre of religious and civic life by the time this map was drawn. Great Yarmouth is shown as a thriving herring port, its harbour central to the North Sea fishing trade that sustained much of the Norfolk coast. King's Lynn appears as a major trading port on the Wash, its merchants long connected to Baltic and continental trade routes. Swaffham, an ancient market town with roots reaching back centuries before this map was made, and Fakenham, a smaller market centre serving the surrounding farmland, round out a sheet that captures Norfolk's dense network of market towns at the heart of East Anglia.

This map is well suited as a gift for a Norfolk collector, or for anyone with family roots in Norwich, Great Yarmouth or the wider East Anglian coast. Norfolk buyers should note we also carry an earlier map of the same county by John Speed, published in 1611: where that Jacobean-era sheet was engraved in England more than fifty years before this one, this 1665 Blaeu edition reflects the later, continental style of Dutch cartography, making the two genuinely distinct portraits of Norfolk rather than duplicates of one another. It is available unframed in a full range of sizes, from a modest print to a larger statement piece.