Unconfigured Ad Widget

Collapse

Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

Map charts Victorian London

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • Map charts Victorian London

    From the WDYTYA magazine website:

    One of the most detailed maps of 19th-century London ever created is now available to view free of charge on the National Library of Scotland website


    The National Library of Scotland has scanned and uploaded the Ordnance Survey’s five-feet to the mile map of London from 1893-1896 to its website.

    Accessible free of charge, family historians can now get an accurate picture of the city when their ancestors were alive and explore streets that have long since disappeared.

    Comprising 729 individual sheets, the map covers the capital in its entirety, including features such as market places and canals. Remarkably, the maps also show the ground floor layout of public buildings, including cathedrals, churches and railway stations.

    While each sheet can be viewed individually, the website enables users to view the maps as a seamless layer over a modern satellite image. With the old and new maps placed on top of each other and matched through careful 'georeferencing', users can see exactly how the landscape has changed by altering the transparency of the layers with a slider at the top of the page.

    Importantly, this mode also means that researchers can locate specific streets by typing in a modern address or postcode.

    The maps were created following several decades of concerns about public health in Britain’s cities. With regular outbreaks of cholera and other infectious diseases, local authorities turned to cartography to see how the problems could be solved. As a result, features relating to the water supply and sewerage are also clearly visible.

    “Victorian town plans were very much the high-point of Ordnance Survey’s urban mapping,” the National Library of Scotland's Jennifer Parkerson told Who Do You Think You Are? Magazine. “Never again did they survey British towns in such detail.”

    The digitisation of the London maps is the latest in a long line of projects at the National Library of Scotland to make its map collections more widely available. While mainly focusing on Scotland, over 50,000 maps of towns and cities across the UK and further afield are accessible online, free of charge.

  • #2
    Took a while to find it but this is the URL:

    Kat

    My avatar is my mother 1921 - 2012

    Comment


    • #3
      Thanks for posting this.

      Just been having a play - fascinating to see the overlay of today's sattelite images.
      Jackie

      Comment


      • #4
        Thanks Carol. Link added to the London/Middlesex page in the reference library.
        Elaine







        Comment

        Working...
        X