We will come, in a few chapters’ time, to one of the most useful and used maps of all time – the London A to Z – and the legend of its creation. But great and useful maps of cities were not invented in the twentieth century. For that distinction, we need to look back to 1593, when John Norden published A Guide for Cuntrey men in the famous Cittee of LONDON, by the helpe of wich plot they shall be able to know how farr it is to any street. As allso to go unto the same, without forder troble.
Norden’s map stretched from Islington in the north down to St Katherine Docks near the Tower of London, and was engraved with great attention to the arrangement of churches and other public buildings, with trees denoting open land and the coats of arms of city livery companies (Grocers, Drapers, Fishmongers) framing the survey in two vertical panels. Key areas included Grayes Inn, Creple-gate, Lambeth mersh and More feyldes, while the banks of the Thames had only one bridge at Southwark but a great many other landmarks: Black friers, Broken wharfe, Three cranes, Olde swann, Bellyns gate. The map’s other significant feature was that it was designed by a Dutchman, Pieter van den Keere.
The places are phonetic exercises to us now, but the map also had one feature of a truly modern street map: letters and numbers were placed at strategic points, and identified in a table at the bottom. It could justifiably claim to be the first A-Z: a marks Bushops gate streete, c is Allhallowes in the wall, k is Holborne Conduct, and z is Cornehill. In a printing from 1653 the index has been greatly expanded to include ninety-five other locations, from Grub streete to Nightfryday streete (passing Faster lane and Pie Corner on the way).
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You could have bought Norden’s map from Peter Stent at ye Whitehose in Giltspur street neere Newgate. Stent was one of six prominent print and mapsellers in the capital in 1660, but he was soon to face fierce competition. The number had tripled by 1690, a burst of activity that reflected two things: London’s new trading prosperity along the Thames, and a craze for printing and collecting maps.
Most of these new maps, covering every part of the known world, were not bound for explorations; they were instead records of them. And most were not intended as symbols of power or influence. They were the first signs that people – or at least London’s merchant classes (Samuel Pepys among them) – found maps fascinating. In their newly affordable form, maps were educational, decorative, imaginative and journalistic. And they reflected the opening up of the world.
Between 1668 and 1719, the London Gazette, the first official newspaper of record, published more than four hundred advertisements from London mapsellers. Their tone varied from plain to frantic – some of them seemed to suggest they were selling not paper representations of new discoveries but the actual land itself. Long before auction catalogues and the opening of Stanfords map shop in the Strand, they provide the first London snapshot of commercial cartography.
What did they show? ‘There is now Extant a new Mapp of the Estates of the Crown of POLAND,’ began one notice in November 1672. ‘Containing all the Dutchies and Provinces of that Kingdome; as Prussia, Cujavia, Mazovia, Russia-nigra, Lithuania, Volhinia, Podolia and the Ukraine. Shewing all the principal Cities, Towns and Fortifications, wherein may be seen the Advance and Progress of the Turkish Armies.’ It was offered by three vendors: John Seller, Hydrographer to the King, at his shop in Exchange Alley, Robert Morden at the Atlas in Cornhill, and Arthur Tooker, ‘overagainst [ie opposite] Salisbury House in the Strand.’
Other shops offered maps of the Netherlands, France and Germany, new plans of North America with special attention paid to English plantations, along with curiosities (John Seller had a map of the Moon) and newly drafted sea charts. In March 1673, James Atkinson, a mathematical instrument maker, offered a map of the Magellan Straits ‘shewing all the depths of Water and Anchorage, Shoulds, and places of danger’, available from the east side of St Savories Dock.
In 1714, a new celestial and astronomical map was promised by the London cartographer and engraver John Senex from the Globe in Salisbury Court. This would include ‘Mr Professor [Edmund] Halley’s Description of the Shadow of the Moon over England in the total eclipse of the Sun’. Due on 22 April, ‘the sudden Darkness will make the Stars visible about the Sun, the like Eclipse not for 500 Years been seen in the Southern Parts of Great Britain … The Map shews every part of England over which the total Darkness will pass.’
And then there were the maps of London. These tended to emphasise newness, and no wonder – they marked the complete rebuilding of the city after the Great Fire of 1666. Indeed the fire marked an entirely unprecedented burst of civic cartography. It was evident to anyone who survived the flames that Norden’s map was simply no longer relevant, and it helped that the ruling monarch, Charles II, was himself a map enthusiast.
In 1675 a new London map was sold by Robert Green at the Rose and Crown in Budge Row with particular attention to Westminster’s ‘Lanes, Allies and Courts, with other Remarks, as they now are’ (at the same time, Green also had ‘A Map of Pensilvania by William Pen Esq’). In 1697, Robert Morden announced a map of London measuring 8ft by 6ft, divided into wards and parishes ‘with all the new Buildings and Improvements of these late years’. The major selling point (and at forty shillings it was the most expensive map of London on offer – most cost one shilling) seemed not to be its size, however; it was the fact that the area covered had been ‘actually Surveyed’.
Ten years later, a London map offered further treasures. A visit to the Bishop’s Head in St Paul’s Churchyard would be rewarded with an eight section, two-volume publication that boasted ‘a more particular Description thereof than has hitherto been publish’d of any City in the World.’ This contained not only ‘all the Streets, Squares, Lanes, Courts etc’ but also their distances from Charing Cross, St Paul’s and The Tower. There was also a list of all the prisons, statues, churches, hospitals, workhouses, fountains, conduits, public baths and ‘Bagnio’s’ (which may mean either a bathhouse, a brothel, or both at once).
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Among all these advertisements and all these maps, there was one printer-cartographer whose name was mentioned ‘above the title’, in the way a Hollywood star is used to sell a film. It was a name to be trusted, not least because it came with royal approval. The name was John Ogilby.
Ogilby commanded such respect that in May 1668 he announced a licensed lottery – in which the winners would obtain a stake in an exciting new project yet to be announced. It was five years before he put them out of their misery, revealing the project was called Britannia and would comprise an extravagant multi-volume survey of England and Wales, featuring county maps, views of English cities and a topographical description ‘of the whole Kingdom.’ New investors, whom Ogilby called ‘Adventurers’, were called upon to repair to Garaway’s Coffee House near the Royal Exchange, where they ‘may put in their Money upon the Author’ – and if they paid enough their name would appear on a cartouche of one of the maps. While they waited, his adventurers could have immediately satisfied themselves with the second volume of Ogilby’s English Atlas, which consisted of his maps of America. Or they could admire his maps and topographical works on China, Japan and Africa, many of them embellished with engravings by Wenceslaus Hollar.
Alongside John Speed, John Ogilby did more than anyone in England to set cartography on a respectful, practical and commercially popular footing, an achievement made even more remarkable because he had come peculiarly late to the trade. In fact, no one in his profession could rival the variety, misfortune or tireless reinvention of his earlier lives.
The Ogilby saga reads like a tale from the circus. He was born near Dundee in 1600, but by the age of six he was in London and his father was in jail for bad debts. His first love was dancing. He became apprenticed to a dancing master in Gray’s Inn Lane and was soon performing at London’s grandest balls. But a particularly complex manoeuvre performed for James I resulted in a broken leg and permanent lameness, after which he turned his attention to teaching and theatre management in Ireland.
A rough financial patch followed, followed by a sea crossing to England during which he was almost shipwrecked. His recovery was aided by one of his previous dancing clients, Lord Strafford, who also recognised his literary talents, and supported Ogilby as a translator of Virgil, Homer and Aesop’s Fables, all of which sold well. He believed he had escaped another personal disaster in 1665 when he fled the Great Plague by moving to Kingston-on-Thames, only to learn a few months later that his house and books had been burnt in the Great Fire. And only then did he move into maps.
Ogilby had previously won favour from the royal court for his lavish account of Charles II’s coronation, and he was appointed a ‘sworn viewer’ (surveyor) of the reconstruction of London. It had become an imprisonable offence to depict the damage caused by the fire, but sketches and plans for a new city were widely encouraged, and several mapmakers set to work to assist civic authorities. Ogilby’s map was by far the most ambitious, promising mapping ‘curiously and accurately performed beyond whatever has yet been attempted for any city of the Universe.’ For his pains, he was given a fifteen-year copyright, one of the first times a cartographer had gained protection for his work.
John Ogilby presenting his Subscription List for Britannia to Charles II and his queen, Catherine of Braganza.
Ogilby didn’t labour alone. His chief surveyor was the mathematician and astronomer William Leybourn, whose task it was to walk the new streets, plotting every building and garden, before returning to Whitefriars to enter his day’s findings on the map. It was truly exhausting work. Writing in 1674, Leybourn wearily noted that he hoped ‘with God’s assistance in a few months time to compleat it.’ But it would take two more years.
The map, at a scale of 100 feet to an inch (1:1200), was first sold in January 1677, and its publication was a major event, comparable with John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress the following year. It was printed on twenty sheets, ideally to be backed and joined by linen, giving an overall size of 8ft 5in by 4ft 7in. In geographical extent, too, it was ambitious, extending from Gray’s Inn and Lincoln’s Inn in the west to Whitechapel in the east, and from Upper Moorfields in the north to the bank of the Thames. It was entitled ‘A Large and Accurate Map of the City of London Ichnographically Describing all the Streets, Lanes, Alleys, Courts, Yards, Churches, Halls and Houses, &c Actually Surveyed and Delineated.’ (An Ichnographic map was typically one that showed a realistic plan rather than a bird’s eye drawing.)
London 1677, mapped by Ogilby and Morgan after the Great Fire, ‘beyond whatever has been attempted for any city of the Universe’. A detail from the map showing St Paul’s. The numbers refer to the most detailed index yet to accompany a London map (or indeed any single map of the time).
A fair amount of credit for the new map should go to Ogilby’s step-grandson, William Morgan, who succeeded him as royal cosmographer and improved the map in subsequent editions. Their work, the most complete and historically significant survey of the capital to date, set a new benchmark in accurate mathematical cartography of cities. The plotting of individual houses and their backyards had not previously been publicly available, and although the level of detail was still far from the standard we would come to expect from Ordnance Survey, Ogilby’s map was perhaps the first to perform the one duty we have come to expect from all city maps since – it enabled visitors to find their way around.
Running one’s finger across its dense hatching and graphite tension today, one still experiences excitement. The streets are wider, the Fleet river is dredged and serviceable again, the city just looks cleaner. In fact, it looks like the sort of model metropolis that architects of today might offer a new client, with agreeable mixed-use housing and green spaces. It is a place of boundless opportunity, all clarity and defined rectangular boundaries. The pastures, free of cattle and ordure, appear just the spot for the Sunday stroll; Billings Gate Dock stands quiet by London Bridge, awaiting cargo. We know from bawdy Restoration theatre that London was exploding with slums, squalor and assault at this time, but the only clue is from the lengthy index that Ogilby and Morgan supplied in a separate booklet: Hooker’s Court, The Fiery Pillar, Scummer Alley, Dagger Alley, Pickaxe Alley, Dark Entry, Slaughter Yard. Sadly, Gropecunt Lane, a popular late-night venue in many British cities in the century before Ogilby was born, does not appear.
And not everything is quite right: St Paul’s, shown as an outline, was probably based on one of Wren’s early sketches rather than the final plans (it is highly likely that Ogilby and Wren knew each other from the Covent Garden coffee houses; it was where the future of the post-destruction city took on its most collaborative and practical shape). And the depiction of the Thames Quay as an attractive river frontage comparable with other European cities was wishful planning and was never realised (or at least, not until the Docklands boom of the 1980s).
But the way this landmark map looked spread out on a table – the impression it gave – was its greatest achievement. It was accurate, and it set a high watermark in civic pride. It reflected what Ogilby had observed when work on the map began, that the swift transformation of London after the fire was a ‘Stupendious Miracle!’ He saw how the ‘Raising from a Confused Heap of Ruines’ had occurred ‘sooner than some believ’d they could remove the Rubbish.’ One can see why Charles II and his courtiers were so supportive of his work: with its broader streets, with its hungry Thames and new docks, the map announced to the world that London was open for business again.
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And if you were tired of London, then John Ogilby could also help you leave it. His great survey of the capital was only a part of his grander Britannia project, an undertaking that almost bankrupted him. His ambitions – to produce a huge atlas of England that would show each town and county in great detail – had to be scaled down when the enormity of the task became clear. But what remained of the scheme was far more original, and it was something that would prove his most famous, beautiful and covetable legacy: the strip map.
As with his map of London, Ogilby wished to improve the lot of the traveller; or at the very least he saw profit in enabling his wealthy patrons to travel the country’s perilous roads in the most direct and hospitable way. His solution was the earliest form of popular road atlas, a collection of one hundred lavishly designed route maps, engraved on copper-plate and printed on heavy paper, intended both for practical coach travel and domestic adornment.
At their simplest, they would guide the traveller from London to Abingdon in Oxfordshire, and then (on another map) from Abingdon to Monmouth in Wales. Yet another London strip set off north-easterly towards Cambridgeshire, taking in Waltham, Hoddesdon, Ware, Royston and Huntingdon before ending at Stilton. Plate 6 took you to Tuxford in Nottinghamshire, Plate 7 from Tuxford to York, Plate 8 from York to Chester-le-Street in County Durham, and Plate 9 from here to Berwick, just south of the Scottish border.
Fourteen of the strips began in the capital. You would set off at point A, and know that en route you’d encounter various staging posts, marshes, rivers, inns, churches, coal pits, arable fields and all manner of what Ogilby called ‘scenographical ornaments’. They prepared the traveller, coachman and prospective highwayman as never before. It was now possible to read the distances and calculate where to stop for a meal or a night robbery.
The maps were extraordinarily accurate. A surveyor had actually gone out with a measuring wheel and walked each route, accompanied by a colleague on horseback carrying supplies. Ogilby insisted on high levels of factual information on each map. He standardised the measurement of the mile, setting it at 1,760 yards rather than the shorter Roman mile of 1,617 yards or the longer ‘old English’ mile of 2,428 yards. Each mile was clearly marked on the strip (at a scale of one inch to the mile). The maps would also show steepness and degrees of arduousness in the form of a pyramid of hills, each pointing in the direction of gradient.
A long pleasant scroll to the West Country: a detail from John Ogilby’s route from London to Cornwall.
One of Ogilby’s biggest cheerleaders in this project was the great Restoration polymath Robert Hooke, the ‘curator of experiments’ at the Royal Society who had also conducted surveys of London after the Great Fire. In many of his previous projects Ogilby was content to repackage existing maps, adding only the flourish of a new cartouche or border; there were already valuable topographic and archaeological studies of Britain by William Camden and John Leland, and they would have been easy to reproduce and elaborate. But Hooke encouraged him to make something entirely novel.
The strip maps were more than useful. They looked stunning and they were fun – not unlike a spotters’ game to keep children diverted on an interminable car journey. Here was a bridge, and not long to go now before there’s a windmill, and only three miles before we’re at the Old Red Lion. To modern eyes, each of the strips resembles a spinning barrel on a fruit machine, with most of the symbols recurring frequently (compasses, clumps of trees, churches), while others (a custom house, a castle) appear only as special attractions. They employed an intricately shaded trompe l’oeil effect, wherein each map looked as if it was written on a slim paper scroll, with the imaginary excess of the paper pleated at the back. Ogilby knew he was onto something. When the strips were complete, he suggested it would be ‘bold to challenge the Universe for a Parallel,’ for ‘nothing of this nature requiring so vast a Charge and such infinite Labour and Disquisition was ever yet Attempted or even Thought of …’
Expensive editions would be hand-coloured, which made them desirable objects to hang on a wall, one reason why so many of the atlases were broken up and maps removed for local interest; the other reason was that travellers would undertake one specific route and saw no reason to take the rest of the country with them as they went. Within a year there would be smaller, cheaper editions, including ‘Ogilby Improv’d’ and ‘The Pocket Book of Roads’, and Ogilby complained to no avail that he was being pirated by printers all over London ‘who Have Rob’d my Book.’
It turned out to be the least of his problems. In 1676, shortly after his strip maps began escorting the English to places they had never been before, Ogilby died, at the age of seventy-six. He was buried in the vault in the ‘Printer’s Church’ of St Bride’s on Fleet Street, not long after Wren had completely rebuilt it after the Great Fire. And there he lay until 29 December 1940, when he was blown to bits as the next great reconfiguration of London was made necessary by the Luftwaffe.
