Category: Antique Maps

John Rocque’s 1746 Map of London

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
John Rocque, A plan of the cities of London and Westminster, and borough of Southwark, with the contiguous buildings, 1746. An engraved map of 18th-century London in 24 panels.
John Rocque, A plan of the cities of London and Westminster, and borough of Southwark, with the contiguous buildings, 1746. Map on 24 sheets, 203 × 385 cm. Library of Congress Geography and Map Division.

A book reprinting John Rocque’s 1746 map of London, a massive 24-sheet, 1:2,437-scale map originally printed in 24 sheets, has just been published. Or rather, republished: it’s an updated reprint of a 1947 paperback by journalist W. Crawford Snowdon that was published to mark the map’s 200th anniversary. The new edition, out from Atlantic Publishing, is updated with better-quality map reproductions and additional illustrations. The “street-by-street” subtitle kind of pitches it as an 18th-century A to Z map. BBC News, Daily Mail, Londonist.

The map itself is available online: see the Library of Congress’s version. Rocque published a smaller-scale map of London in the same year, for which see this Royal Museums Greenwich article.

London in the 18th Century: Street by Street—John Rocque 
by W. Crawford Snowden
Atlantic Publishing, 5 Mar 2026, £25. 
Amazon (Canada, UK)

Da Vinci’s Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
An octant map of the world circa 1514, showing the globe in eight pieces, that is increasingly attributed to Leonardo da Vinci.
Leonardo da Vinci’s authorship of this 1514 octant map of the world has been disputed over the years.

Miguel García Álvarez looks at the maps of Leonardo da Vinci. “Leonardo never wrote a treatise on geography, as Ptolemy did, but his understanding of the territory and the importance of finding effective ways to represent it was far ahead of his contemporaries. I could simply leave you with his collection of maps, and I guarantee you would be fascinated by their beauty. Instead, I am going to limit myself to just three and use them to illustrate how he achieved three crucial advances in the early 16th century that are fundamental to understanding the history of geography.”

See also Christopher Tyler, “Leonardo da Vinci’s World Map,” Cosmos and History 13 (2017).

One-Day Oxford Symposium Explores Digital and Analog Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Maps: Digital | Analogue is a one-day symposium from the Sunderland Collection, held in conjunction with the Bodleian Libraries, taking place on 26 February 2026. “Discover the secrets that digitisation can reveal about historical maps and atlases, explore the world of online gaming maps, learn about globes and conservation, and find out all about the colours and pigments used in early cartography.” Free registration, streamed and in-person at Oxford’s Weston Library.

Previously: Oculi Mundi.

The History of Greenland’s Mapping as Context and Counterpoint

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

A map dealer’s catalogue is not the first place you’d expect to be a locus of resistance. Even so, in the first 2026 catalogue from map dealer Neatline Maps, Kristoffer Damgaard curates a selection of Greenland-focused material, along with a ten-page history of the mapping and exploration of Greenland. “Understanding how Greenland was explored and mapped over time provides an important context for understanding why the present confrontation is so deeply unnecessary and wrong.” Thanks to Fred for the tip.

Monsters and Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Surekha Davies writes about on how monsters on maps led to her first book and then, in her second, to a consideration of why monsters exist as a category.

By taking images of monstrous peoples on maps seriously I broke both molds. For traditionalists, engravings of headless men in Guiana or giants in Patagonia were what they called “myth,” “fantasy,” or “mere decoration”: cartographers supposedly added monsters to make their maps more appealing to buyers, or because they feared empty space. The “maps as politics” brigade offered a third explanation: monsters on European maps from the age of exploration were propaganda crafted to justify colonialism. For both factions, there was supposedly nothing more to say. I begged to differ.

The Man Who Drew Wellington

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Thomas Ward survey map of Wellington City, sheet 22, 1892. Wellington City Council Archives.
Thomas Ward survey map of Wellington City, sheet 22, 1892. Wellington City Council Archives.

In the 1890s, Thomas Ward created maps of the city of Wellington, New Zealand that are the subject of a new book by Elizabeth Cox, Mr Ward’s Map, and this article in New Zealand Geographic about both Ward and Cox’s book:

Over two and a half years, Ward walked every street in the city. He drew the outline of every single building, including garden sheds and outhouses (but spared himself the effort of documenting henhouses). Historian Elizabeth Cox thinks that Ward may have knocked on all the doors of all Wellington’s houses, too, because he recorded the number of rooms in each dwelling, the number of storeys, and the building materials used. The resulting map is huge, spanning 88 sheets of paper, each the size of a poster. […]

After Ward stopped updating the map himself, others took on the task—much less perfectly, notes Cox—leaving behind ink spills, coffee-cup rings, drips of tea, and scribbled mathematical equations. It was the city’s primary map for more than 80 years, only superseded in the 1970s.

Today, a copy of Ward’s original, plus many of its subsequent versions, lives in a set of wide, shallow drawers in the Wellington City Archives—and online, as an overlay in mapping software for anyone to use.

Ward’s maps can be seen here and here (updated version). As you can see from the sample above, they’re at a level of detail that would give Sanborn maps a run for their money. Thanks to Ken Dowling for the tip.

Book cover: Mr Ward’s Map by Elizabeth Cox

Mr Ward’s Map: Victorian Wellington Street by Street
by Elizabeth Cox
Massey University Press, 13 Nov 2025, NZD $90
Amazon (Canada, UK) | Bookshop

More on Secret Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Doug Specht has a piece about the British Library’s exhibition Secret Maps in The Conversation. “The exhibition does not shy away from difficult topics. Maps tracing the infrastructure of apartheid, or those produced to facilitate war or surveillance, sit alongside playful artefacts such as the iconic Where’s Wally? books. The effect is to remind us that all mapping, whether for adventure, statecraft, or protest, is fundamentally about control: who gets to see, who gets seen and who decides.”

I’d forgotten that past British Library exhibitions (London: A Life in Maps, Magnificent Maps) generated all kinds of coverage. This might not be the last piece we see on this exhibition.

Previously: New British Library Exhibition: Secret Maps; Secret Maps, the Book.

Ireland: Mapping the Island

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

RTÉ has published an excerpt from Ireland: Mapping the Island by Joseph Brady and Paul Ferguson, the latest book of cartographic histories published by Birlinn (though Birlinn’s website seems to be offline at the moment).

Book cover: Ireland: Mapping the Island

This book – Ireland – Mapping the Island – is a celebration of the maps of Ireland produced over the centuries. We aim to give our readers a sense of the huge variety of maps that have been drawn and of their value as documents. Quite a number of themes run through the book. We look at the importance of boundaries, what maps tell us about the development of towns and settlements, the ways in which maps have been used to create impressions of place, their role in the development of travel and how they facilitated the emergence of the ‘tourist’. We also look at how others saw us and particularly at the maps produced since the 1930s by the military powers of a number of countries. One central focus is on how we learned about the shape and internal geography of Ireland. Before the development of airplanes and spacecraft, people had to take it on trust that we correctly knew the shape of the island of Ireland. That knowledge had been gradually refined for centuries and the state of knowledge was captured in the maps produced in each era.

Ireland: Mapping the Island by Joseph Brady and Paul Ferguson. Birlinn, 2 Oct 2025 (U.S. 2 Dec 2025), £30/$45. Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop.

Secret Maps, the Book

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Both the U.K. and U.S. covers of Secret Maps, a book accompanying a British Library exhibition of the same name.

I didn’t put two and two together. Secret Maps, the British Library exhibition (previously), has an accompanying book, because British Library exhibitions invariably come with books. And that book was already listed on my Map Books of 2025 page: Secret Maps: How they Conceal and Reveal the World by Tom Harper, Nick Dykes, and Magdalena Peszko, who curated the exhibition, is out now from British Library Publishing; it comes out in the U.S. in a couple of weeks, under the title Secret Maps: Maps You Were Never Meant to See, from the Middle Ages to Today, from the University of Chicago Press.

Secret Maps by Tom Harper, Nick Dykes and Magdalena Peszko. British Library, 24 Oct 2025, £40. University of Chicago Press, 14 Nov 2025, $39. Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop.

New British Library Exhibition: Secret Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Banner illustration from the British Library’s Secret Maps page.
British Library

A new exhibition opened at the British Library this weekend: Secret Maps.

Maps have always been more than just tools for navigation – in the hand of governments, groups and individuals, maps create and control knowledge. In Secret Maps, we trace the levels of power, coercion and secrecy that lie behind maps from the 14th century to the present day, and uncover the invisible forces that draw and distort the world around us.

Some of the maps on display reveal hidden landscapes, offering insight into places long forgotten or erased from official histories. Others are purposefully deceptive, designed to protect treasures, mask strategic locations, or reshape the way we see the world. This exhibition uncovers each of their individual secrets, revealing their hidden purposes and power.

The exhibition runs until 18 January 2016. Tickets cost £20. There are also a number of talks, tours, workshops and other events affiliated with the exhibition; they’re listed at the bottom of the exhibition’s web page.

Update: There’s also a book.

Update #2: Strike action by British Library workers may affect opening hours. See this page for information.

A Short Course on Maps as Historical Sources

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Historic Maps: Interpreting Stories of Place is a three-day short course on using maps as historical sources is being offered by the Institute of Historical Research in London from January 28 to 30, 2026.

Although maps have long been a part of historical research, they are subjective and should always be analysed in the same way as any other primary source. This dynamic 3-day Historic Maps Discovery Training will include lectures, one-to-one consultations, library tours, visits to our special collections and opportunities to explore our digital resource Layers of London. Together, we will learn about the different types of historic map, from the evolution of cartography to the simple digital tools you can use for comparison and analysis in your own projects. 

It costs £240; no prior expertise or experience required. Via Katie Parker, who’s one of the instructors.

Oculi Mundi

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Geographical has an article about Oculi Mundi, the online home of the Sunderland Collection, a private collection of 13th- to 19th-century maps amassed over the years by its eponymous founder, Neil Sunderland, that sat in storage before the decision to digitize it and make it more accessible. I’m glad the article is here to introduce us to the collection, because the Oculus Mundi site is a bit over-designed and can be a challenge to navigate, especially at first. But making private map collections digitally accessible is always a good and laudatory thing, and in this case there’s plenty of good stuff to browse: try starting with this link.

Two Books Map London

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Book covers for The Boroughs of London by Mike Hall and Matt Brown (Batsford, October 2025) and Modern London Maps by Vincent Westbrook (Batsford, May 2025).
Batsford

Two books out this year, both from Batsford, explore London through maps. Vincent Westbrook’s Modern London Maps focuses on more than 60 maps from the 20th century. Like many books of this kind, Modern London Maps draws primarily from a single source: the London Archives. Mapping London reviewed it last month: “probably quite close to the book that we would have published.” And out next month, The Boroughs of London collects Mike Hall’s “boldly coloured, highly detailed maps of every London borough, inspired by classic 1960s graphic design,” pairing it with commentary by Matt Brown.

Related: Map Books of 2025.

Reading Historic Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Reading Historic Maps: A Practical Guide “is an educational resource designed to help students and educators better understand historic maps. Focusing on depictions of navigation and conquest in world maps, the guide explains where to find these maps and how to analyze both common and unique cartographic details. The guide also contains suggested further readings and appendixes of additional maps to view.” Created by Kathy Hart, this 12-page PDF document covers the basics of what the details on old maps can tell the reader. [Paige Roberts]