Old Map of Northamptonshire in 1844 by Samuel Lewis - Northampton, Kettering, Wellingborough

Samuel Lewis compiled this map of Northamptonshire in 1844 as part of the county surveys accompanying his Topographical Dictionary of England, a project that set out to record every English parish, market town and hamlet with a short account of its history and character. Lewis's maps were built to be used alongside that written gazetteer, so they carry a density of place names well beyond what earlier county cartographers typically included, plotting parish and hundred boundaries as well as the roads and waterways connecting them. By 1844 Northamptonshire's economy was shifting away from its long-standing wool and leather trades toward heavier industry, and Lewis's sheet captures the county at that turning point, midway between its medieval market-town origins and the railway-driven expansion that would follow within a generation.

Northampton itself, recorded as Hamtun in the Domesday Book and founded as a settlement as early as 914, appears as the map's principal town, an old royal borough and trading centre sitting on the River Nene, the waterway that also passes through Wellingborough on its course east toward Peterborough. Kettering, an Anglo-Saxon settlement traceable to the 10th century, was by this date already building the shoe trade that would come to define the town through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Corby, with roots reaching back to Viking-era settlement in the 8th century, remained a small village on this map, decades before the 19th-century ironstone industry transformed it into an industrial town. Wellingborough, known since the 6th century and long noted for its five medieval wells, was an established market centre for wool and cloth, while Rushden, inhabited since the Saxon period, was on the cusp of becoming a major boot and shoe manufacturing hub. Daventry, an ancient market town holding its own royal charters, and the River Welland further north, round out a county still defined largely by market towns and waterways rather than industrial cities.

This map suits anyone whose family has roots in the boot and shoe towns of Northamptonshire, where trades like Kettering's and Rushden's often passed from one generation to the next within the same streets. It is available unframed in a full range of sizes, so it can be scaled to suit a family room or a smaller study nook. A thoughtful gift for a Northamptonshire native who has since moved away, or for anyone marking a house move back to the county their grandparents once called home, this 1844 Lewis edition offers a detailed, parish-level record of the county exactly as it stood before the railways and ironstone works reshaped it for good.