NomoneyNohoney wrote:Found this on Reddit today : a website with many different types of maps to view, including Ordnance Survey maps from the 1840s. See how your area has changed over the years!
http://maps.nls.uk/os/From their home page there's other types to explore as well...
Wonderful stuff, hope you won't mind if I x-post to London Lovers board
I happen to collect old maps, I find them FASCINATING! My oldest being 1570 [Ortelius map of er.... what is now Great Britain]. I find their inaccuracies, from that era striking, they remind us of our horizons back then, like the little island of 'Brasil' about 200 miles to the west of Ireland
I have a Tomaso Porcacci map of the current day USA from 1576, and paid £50-60 or so for it at a west-country auction. This one> that got £2375 recently at Christies
http://www.christies.com/lotfinder/Lot/ ... tails.aspxI have some later OS maps from c1880[?], linen backed, of West London that I picked up at Portobello Road for about £10 a piece in the '90s.
It's fascinating to see from an image via your link that the street my London home is on, went by another name, that of an adjacent sub-district in fact, back in the 1874 edition. That's a surprise to me, brilliant!
I have maaany other maps. From ones by Michael Drayton, Queen Elizabeth 1sts Court Poet which are whimsical to the point of minimalism and geographic irrelevance. His thing seems to have been 'river nymphs'. Here London/Middlesex >
http://www.johnunderwoodbooks.com/book/ ... tfordshire And Ogilby's 1675 road map of the route from London to Oxford.
http://www.wellandantiquemaps.co.uk/roa ... ilby-c1698and the second part of that 3 part London to Aberystwyth series, which might be Oxford - Bristol or similar.
These maps were supposedly practical travellers maps. A coachman would have them open in his lap, and look out for the geographic indicators shown, an uphill stretch is shown as a hill, whereas a hill shown literally upside down was a piece of road going downhill. There's a lot more detail shown, 'boggy parts', and 'dangers' are noted. The toll-gate at Noten-Barnes [>c1840], marks the entry road to Noten Barns Farm, the old Notting Hill Farm [later Portobello Road named after the Battle of Portobello], that gave it's name to Notting Hill Gate.
How deep you you want to go, these old maps are amazing?