Old Map of the Railways and Canals in England and Wales in 1837 by SDUK - Early Railway Age, Canals, Turnpikes, Rivers

The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge did not exist to flatter its readers; founded in London in 1826 by Lord Brougham and a circle of reform-minded Whigs, its purpose was to put accurate, affordable knowledge within reach of Britain's growing middle and working classes. Between 1829 and the early 1840s the Society's map committee issued more than two hundred plates through the publishers Baldwin and Cradock, engraved with meticulous care by the firm of J. and C. Walker. This particular sheet, England with its Canals and Railways, was issued on the first of October 1837 and captures a transport network still very much in transition.

Only a handful of railway lines existed anywhere in England and Wales when this map was drawn, just seven years after the Liverpool and Manchester Railway had opened in 1830 as the world's first true inter-city passenger line worked entirely by steam locomotives. The map traces that pioneering route, along with the newer Grand Junction Railway linking Birmingham to the north-west, London's short Greenwich line, and the older Stockton and Darlington line further north. Around these few iron threads runs the far denser network that still carried most of Britain's goods in 1837: the Grand Junction, Trent and Mersey, Bridgewater and Leeds and Liverpool canals, along with the principal rivers and turnpike roads connecting the kingdom's ports and manufacturing towns.

This sheet rewards anyone drawn to the economic history of Britain, to the story of the SDUK itself, or simply to the look of a transport map from the dawn of the railway age. It has been reproduced at high resolution from an original SDUK engraving and is available in several print sizes. Set against the store's later railway maps of 1872 and 1881, it reads almost like a photograph of the exact hinge moment when canals still ruled freight and steam had barely begun to compete.