Map of London from 18th Century to be republished
An 18th Century official map of London, which provides an incredibly detailed image of the capital will be republished more than two and a half centuries after its initial printing.
John Rocque’s An Exact Survey of the Cities of London and Westminster, and the Borough of Southwark gave the first ever detailed bird’s eye view of London, at a time when the population of the capital was around 650,000.
The map is “almost miraculous,” says English Heritage historian Steven Brindle, especially when you consider the available tools and technology at the time. Brindle says that cartography or map making was more difficult at the time, making the map of London more impressive.
“Rocque would have set out with a couple of assistants and some very basic tools,” he said. “A chain, 66ft long, a surveyor’s wheel and a notebook, and they would go over, for example, a field, and they would measure it on all its sides, and they would draw that as accurately as they could. It might be a few days’ work. And it’s really accurate.”
It’s this, he says, which “almost seems miraculous.” The City of London then “was packed with dense alleys and streets, a lot of them very insanitary. There were slums just a couple of streets away from really rich merchants living in their houses. The city had large fields, orchards – and tall ships crowded the Thames. It’s all depicted on Rocque’s masterpiece created in 1746.”
Many of the places on the map of London were fields laying outside the City. But there are buildings there that still exist to this day.
“London changed and rebuilt so much,” Brindle said, “now the other buildings all loom over the church.”
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