Two bound sets of maps from the British Library’s core collection of early modern English cartography have recently been digitised and placed online. Harley MS 3749 is a series of 18 hand-drawn maps of parts of the Royal estate at Windsor, produced in 1607 by the English surveyor, mapmaker and author John Norden (c. 1547-1625).

John Norden, 'A DESCRIPTION OF THE HONOR OF WINDESOR..' Windsor or London, 1607. Harley MS 3749, f. 1r.

Harley MS 3813 is a collection of 37 (of an original 44) small printed maps of English and Welsh counties and areas of Ireland and Scotland, engraved by the Flemish artist Pieter Van den Keere (1571-c. 1646) and printed at around the same time as Norden’s work. Their histories are entwined in various ways.

Pieter Van den Keere,'Scotiae pars que incolis Stratna hern vocatur cum circumsinys' in [A collection of engraved maps of the British Isles], Amsterdam, c. 1605. Harley MS 3813, f. 178v.

Both sets of maps ended up in the collection of Robert (1661-1724) and Edward (1689-1741) Harley, the 1^st and 2^nd Earls of Oxford, thousands of manuscripts, printed books and associated materials which became one of the founding collections of the British Museum in 1753. Norden’s work, produced for and originally owned by James VI and I, came into the Harleys’ possession in 1710, whilst Van der Keere’s maps reached the collection in 1725.

In addition to their shared provenance, it is interesting to note that the two mapmakers knew and worked with each other. As well as his surveying work and devotional writing, Norden conceived of  a grand multi-volume county-by-county geography or ‘chorography’ of Britain, having recognised, like others, the public appetite for maps and geographical writings following the success of Christopher Saxton’s atlas of 1579. Norden’s Speculum Britannia was not completed, but he started work on a number of counties, and even published some of them. The first published county, in 1593, was Middlesex, containing maps including ones of London and Westminster engraved by one Pieter Van den Keere.

John Norden, 'London', from Speculum Britannia: Middlesex. London, 1593. Maps Crace Port 1. 21.

Van den Keere would become one of the most important engravers of the 17^th century. He had moved to London in 1584, and was apprenticed to the London-based Dutch engraver Jodocus Hondius (1563-1612). He left London for Amsterdam in 1593.

Pieter Van den Keere, 'Northamtoniae Bedfordiae Cantabrigae Huntingdonae et Rutlandiae com'. Amsterdam, c. 1605. Harley MS 3813, f. 45v.

Northamton, Bedfordiæ, Cantabrigiæ, Huntingdoniæ et Rutlandiæ comitatuum vicinarumq. regionum partium adiacent nova veraq. descriptio a.o. d. 1576 / Christophorus Saxton descripsit. London, 1579. Maps C.3.bb.5.

Harley MS 3813 is one of several ‘proof’ sets of small county maps copied from Saxton’s and others’ maps of parts of Britain. It is commonly thought of as the blueprint for a mooted atlas of Britain along similar lines of Norden’s Speculum. Writing in 1972, Helen Wallis believed that it might have been Van Den Keere’s collaboration with Norden that inspired him. The Harley example has been finely hand-coloured and contains hand-written descriptions on the topography and gentry of each county (another set in the Royal Geographical Society has the same handwritten text), suggesting the role of a mock-up of what such a publication might look like.

Pieter Van den Keere, [handwritten notes concerning the counties of Northamptonshire, Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Huntingdon and Rutland]. Amsterdam[?] , c. 1605. Harley MS 3813, f. 46r.

The date of 1599 appears on three maps and it is sensible to assume that Van den Keere engraved them all around this time. But he didn't print them until 1605 or later, observed R.A. Skelton in 1970, due to the evidence of the paper used. The maps were not officially published until 1617 in an illustrated abridgment of Camden’s Britannia by the Amsterdam publisher Blaeu.

John Speed, 'Midlesex described with the most famous cities of London and Westminster' from The theatre of the empire of Great Britaine. London, 1611-12. Maps C.7.c.20.

For whatever reason, neither Van den Keere’s or Norden’s projects properly got off the ground. The work which eventually sated the English appetite for maps was John Speed’s Theatre of the empire of Great Britaine of 1611-12, which incidentally included county maps engraved by Van den Keere's former teacher Jodocus Hondius. Speed’s Middlesex map (above) even incorporated copies of the Van den Keere-engraved London and Westminster maps that had appeared in Norden’s Speculum... Middlesex of two decades earlier.

John Norden, [A map of Windsor Castle] in A description of the honor of Windesor.... 1607. Harley MS 3749, fs.001r.

Norden’s little atlas of Windsor royal parks (Harley MS 3749) was the sort of project Norden turned to following the stalling of his Speculum. It is a bespoke and exclusive product drawn on vellum, showing for the royal landowners’ gratification their palaces and deer-stocked parks. This tradition of manuscript mapping of private estates would extend into the 20^th century, but county atlases such as Van den Keere’s became in many ways the principal English cartographic output, certainly up to the end of the 18^th century. This is proven by the strong afterlife of Van den Keere’s small county maps, which were reissued in various forms, including as a 'minature Speed atlas' (despite their having preceded Speed) up to 1676.

Pieter Van den Keere, England Wales Scotland and Ireland described and abridged ... from a farr larger Volume done by John Speed. London, 1627. Maps C.7.a.6.

Despite their obvious differences, the two Harley volumes have displayed an oddly close bond down the centuries, right up to the present day with their digitisation and placing online together. This might not have been the case had they suffered the fate that befell the rest of the Harleian collection in 1890 when, as part of a deal between the British Museum’s Departments of Printed Books and Manuscripts, the printed and manuscript material was separated and apportioned between the two.

With this in mind, it is serendipitous that the two atlases remain a just few shelves away from each other, albeit one a printed anomaly within a collection of the written and drawn.

References:

• Laurence Worms & Ashley Baynton-Williams, British map engravers: a dictionary of engravers, lithographers and their principal employers to 1850 (London: Rare Book Society, 2011).
• Sarah Bendall, Dictionary of land surveyors and local map-makers of Great Britain and Ireland 1530-1850. (London: British Library, 1997).
• Rodney Shirley, Maps in the atlases of the British Library: a descriptive catalogue c. AD 850-1800 (London: British Library, 2004).
• Atlas of the British Isles. By Pieter Van den Keere c. 1605 / Introduction by Helen Wallis (Lympne Castle, Kent: Harry Margary, 1972).
• Frank Kitchen, ‘John Norden (c. 1547-1625)’ in Oxford dictionary of national biography [accessed 5 December 2022].
• R.A. Skelton, County atlases of the British Isles, 1579-1850: a bibliography (London: Carta Press, 1970).
• Peter Barber, ‘Mapmaking in England, ca. 1470-1650’ in David Woodward (ed.), The history of cartography volume 3: part 2, cartography in the European Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 1589-1669. 

The British Library and National Library of Scotland are pleased to announce the availability of a new gazetteer which allows all the names on the Roy Military Survey Maps of Scotland (1747-55, British Library Maps CC.5.a.441) to be searched and browsed. Through the hard work of a team of volunteers over the last six months, all 33,523 names on the Roy Map have been recorded. The transcription workflow has also recorded related or nearby names from the Ordnance Survey 1st edition mapping from a century later in order to help searching and provide additional context for the Roy names. The results are of huge value for local and family historians, placename researchers, as well as all those interested in the landscape of 18th century Scotland. As well as being able to find any name on the map, it is also possible to now generate distribution maps of particular name elements, or dynamically view all of the names in a particular area. The Gazetteer can also be downloaded in accessible formats for onward use and research.

Keyword searching for ‘mill’ names on the Roy Highlands layer to view a distribution map. (View online)

The Roy Military Survey Map is surely one of the most significant and attractive maps of Scotland. It was a distillation of military intelligence, planned in the wake of the defeat of the Jacobites at Culloden in 1746, and surveyed at the same time as the brutal ‘pacification’ of the Highlands. The English military commanders in Scotland during the Jacobite Rebellion of the ‘45 had been 'greatly embarrassed for want of a proper Survey of the Country' and something needed to be done about it. The decision to place the Survey in the hands of a young civilian from a small village near Carluke, William Roy - who had no military surveying experience, and who was then in his early 20s - was a surprising one, even if it turned out to be an inspired and successful decision. Over the next eight years, until the mid 1750s, the whole of the Scottish mainland was surveyed at the detailed scale of one inch to a thousand yards, or about 1:36,000. For many parts of the Scottish Highlands, it is the most detailed and informative map that survives for the entire 18th century, and for all areas, the only standard topographic map prior to the Ordnance Survey mapping in the 19th century. As part of the King George III Topographical Collections, it has always been a treasured item within the British Library’s holdings, and fortunately more recent digital technologies have allowed its wider availability online, as well as transcription projects like this.

A detail from the Roy Military Survey of the environs around Kenmore in Perthshire, with the lower end of Loch Tay to the left.

Our project to record all of the names on the Roy Map was based on the long interest in the map from those hunting for the existence and location of particular places, especially for local and family history purposes. Place name researchers have also regularly examined the Roy Map as a key documentary source for the 18th century. Many of the textual entries on the map allow other types of research too, confirming the location of things like mills, kirks, castles and estate grounds. Many significant elements of the pre-Improvement landscape - such as the smaller kirk towns and cottar towns, as well as things like moors and commonties - are clearly shown too. But libraries lack the manpower for major gazetteer recording projects, and although machine-learning and artificial intelligence continue to make strides, we felt that the only way to achieve our objective at present was by gathering a volunteer group as part of a crowdsourcing project.

The Roy Map transcriptions interface, allowing both the Roy Map name (left) and the Ordnance Survey first edition name (right) to be transcribed.

In January 2022 we asked for volunteers to help with three new map transcription projects, and were thrilled (and relieved!) to find over 650 people signed up to take part. We were able to create the interfaces for recording the names using the open-source web-mapping software behind the NLS maps website, and this was helpful, as we continued to change and update these interfaces in response to feedback. We also set up an online discussion forum for participants, which has been very heavily used - 142 members, and over 210 posts over a 5 month period. Successive phases of the project revised and checked the initial names, and their related Ordnance Survey names, so that all of the names were reviewed and edited several times over. The success of the project owes itself very much to these volunteers, who have not only put in several months of hard work, but also continued to suggest changes as we went along to improve the results. As with all website projects, we also have the ability to keep revising and correcting names in response to feedback - the Gazetteer will become ever more perfect over time! Although we have just now launched the Gazetteer, some minor revision work is still ongoing, and we are happy to receive suggestions and corrections from the wider community.

The Roy Map Transcription interface showing work in progress - names in blue with one transcription and those in green with a second transcription.

Would William Roy have approved? We certainly hope so - as the “father” of what became the Ordnance Survey, he would have fully understood the value of national initiatives to gather geographic and topographic information. He would surely have delighted in the detailed scrutiny which his ‘magnificent military sketch’ was still getting, over 250 years after its original creation. That said, he might feel puzzled and worried about all the tartan, now very visibly on sale only a stone’s throw from where his Military Survey was drawn in Edinburgh Castle!

View the results of the Roy Military Survey Gazetteer Project:

• Roy Gazetteer information page
• Search all the Roy Names with a map
• Browse all the Roy Names as a list

 

By Christopher Fleet,

Map Curator, National Library of Scotland.

 

An early print from the British Library’s map collection is currently on display at the Stadtmuseum Münster in an exhibition entitled Münster 1570: History and stories from the capital of Westphalia.

It is a panorama of the town of Münster executed in 1570 by the Flemish artist Remigius Hogenberg (c. 1536 - 1588), and based on a drawn panorama of 1569 by Hermann tom Ring (1521-1596).

Westvaliae Metropolis Monasteriũ. R. Hogenbergus sculpsit. [Münster, 1570]. Maps 189.b.10.

It shows the Westphalia capital from the south west, with the main churches dominating the skyline and various domestic structures arranged behind the town walls. Outside these walls Hogenberg presents a range of human activity. To the left carts enter the town, whilst to the right in the foreground, figures swim in the River Aa. Some can be seen getting undressed, one needs help in doing so. A dog stands guard over a pile of clothes. This sort of foreground vignette is a typical feature of later 16^th century town views, not only entertaining for the viewer but demonstrating that places are about more than their buildings.

A detail showing people bathing in the River Aa

As a snapshot of a place at a particular time, the panorama is understandably of great historical value to the town. It was produced only decades after the Anabaptist rebellion of 1534-5, in which a radical reformation sect took over, enforcing religious conformity, seizing possessions and religiously-motivated destruction. The rebellion was eventually put down and the leaders executed, their bodies placed into three iron cages hung on the tower of St. Lambert’s church. The cages, which are still in situ today, are shown in the print just above the lancet windows of the church tower. 

Detail showing St. Lambert's church with three cages attached to the tower

Remigius Hogenberg, who produced the print while resident in Münster, presented a proof copy of it to the town council on 26 May 1570. However, this is lost and the British Library’s example, purchased in 1868 from the Berlin book dealer Adolphus Asher, is the only copy known to survive. As well as exhibiting the original, the Stadtmuseum exhibition has skilfully incorporated the image into their design and graphics.

Stadtmuseum Münster, entrance to the Münster 1570 exhibition. Picture credit: Stadtmuseum Münster, Foto: Sarah Kottmeier

Remigius was born in Mechelen in modern-day Belgium. He was in England by 1572, and alongside other continental artists such as Cornelis de Hooghe and Jodocus Hondius was responsible for producing various engravings there, including maps. For example, Remigius engraved nine of Christopher Saxton’s county maps (see his Lancashire, below), as well as the frontispiece for the 1579 atlas which included them.

Lancastriæ comitatus palatin vera et absoluta descriptio. Anno D.ni. 1577 / Christophorus Saxton descripsit. Remigius Hogenbergius sculpsit. London, 1577. Maps C.3.bb.5.

Despite Remigius’s fame, he remains arguably less-well known than his engraver-brother Frans (c. 1540-1590). With Georg Braun, Frans produced the first town atlas, the Civitatis Orbis Terrarum, published in Cologne between 1572 and 1617. Among the contents is a smaller and more subdued version of the panorama of Münster, copied from his brother's.

Georg Braun & Frans Hogenberg, MONASTERIUM urbs in media Westphalia...,from Civitatis Orbis Terrarum, volume 1, Cologne,1572. Image from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:MuensterRemiusHogenberg1570.jpg

Münster 1570: History and stories from the capital of Westphalia is at the Stadtmuseum Münster until 25 September 2022.

The second tranche of maps from George III’s Topographical Collection have been released onto the Georeferencer platform recently and the platform is already a hive of activity! British Library colleagues have selected the 7891 images that depict maps from the 32,000 that comprise George III’s collection of atlases and albums of views, plans, diagrams, reports and surveys, produced between 1550 and 1820. You can find out more about the images themselves in this blog post.

Georeferenced map of Great Britain and Ireland from Jan Jansson's Novus Atlas, 1649 (Maps 9.TAB.4) available here (https://britishlibrary.georeferencer.com/maps/18318d9e-f7ad-4265-8d55-05fe59875567/view)

There are some beautiful maps to georeference including multi-sheet maps in loose or bound format including Turgot’s plan of Paris,  Morgan’s map of London, Peter Andre’s Essex, Fry & Jefferson’s Virginia, Pratt’s Ireland and Müller’s Bohemia.

If you are new to the Georeferencer head over to our ‘how to use’ page (https://www.bl.uk/help/how-to-use-the-georeferencer) where you can find detailed instructions.

As ever, please do note that it might not be possible to georeference all the images as it is very likely that some plans of mines, topographic views, images of the moon and other oddities may have crept in. I would be grateful if you could pass on any URLs for such material to [email protected] and I will try to remove them. Thanks for your help with this, much appreciated.

I hope you enjoy georeferencing the maps, why not head over to the platform (http://britishlibrary.georeferencer.com/start) and give it a go!

Selected Georeferencer links to maps mentioned in the text:

Turgot’s plan of Paris (

http://british-library.georeferencer.com/id/mapsu4utabu22up002

http://british-library.georeferencer.com/id/mapsu4utabu22up005

http://british-library.georeferencer.com/id/mapsu4utabu22up008

http://british-library.georeferencer.com/id/mapsu4utabu22up011

)

Morgan’s map of London (

http://british-library.georeferencer.com/id/mapsu175utu2u1u9

http://british-library.georeferencer.com/id/mapsu175utu2u1u10

http://british-library.georeferencer.com/id/mapsu175utu2u1u11

http://british-library.georeferencer.com/id/mapsu175utu2u1u12

)

Peter Andre’s Essex (

http://british-library.georeferencer.com/id/mapsu188ulu1uindex

http://british-library.georeferencer.com/id/mapsu188ulu1u001

http://british-library.georeferencer.com/id/mapsu188ulu1u002

http://british-library.georeferencer.com/id/mapsu188ulu1u003

)

Fry & Jefferson’s Virginia (

http://british-library.georeferencer.com/id/mapsu188ulu3u2-001

http://british-library.georeferencer.com/id/mapsu188ulu3u2-002

http://british-library.georeferencer.com/id/mapsu188ulu3u2-003

http://british-library.georeferencer.com/id/mapsu188ulu3u2-004

)

Pratt’s Ireland (

http://british-library.georeferencer.com/id/mapsu175utu4u001

http://british-library.georeferencer.com/id/mapsu175utu4u002

http://british-library.georeferencer.com/id/mapsu175utu4u003

http://british-library.georeferencer.com/id/mapsu175utu4u004

)

Müller’s Bohemia (

http://british-library.georeferencer.com/id/118uau3u2-001

http://british-library.georeferencer.com/id/118uau3u2-002

http://british-library.georeferencer.com/id/118uau3u3-001

http://british-library.georeferencer.com/id/118uau3u3-002

)

With thanks to Joan Francis for her help in making the maps available.

Gethin Rees

 

The Map collection is offering a 3-month placement for a PhD candidate to work with the British Library’s collection of pre-1900 Japanese produced maps. With the deadline for applications fast approaching this Friday 25th February, here is a final attempt to whet your appetites.

The collection of 350 Japanese-produced maps is one of the finest held outside of Japan. It includes printed and hand-drawn maps of the world, East Asia, Japan itself and its various subdivisions, towns and coasts, dating from the 17^th 18^th and 19^th centuries. It includes route maps, bird’s-eye views, administrative maps, military maps and historical maps. Some of them are rather large.

Nihonkoku oezu, by an anonymous mapmaker. Woodblock, published between 1684-1688. Ex-Kaempfer collection. Or.75.f.13.

A number of the maps came to the British Museum, now British Library, via the founding collection of Sir Hans Sloane (1660-1753) in the 1750s. Sloane had acquired the Japanese-related collections of Englebert Kaempfer (1651-1716) in the mid-1720s, who had collected them during his time in Japan, working as a doctor for the Dutch East India Company. Many other maps formed part of the collection of Philipp Franz von Siebold (1796-1866), which was purchased by the British Museum in 1868.

Kyo oezu [A Large map of Kyoto]. Manuscript, produced in 1826. Maps 25.b.29.

Today the maps are split between two areas. The majority are held in the map collection (part of Western Heritage Collections), which contains over 4 million maps and global coverage of the period 1540 to 2022. A smaller number of maps are held in the Library’s Japanese collections, a section of the Asian and African Department.

Maps 25.b.29 being photographed by British Library imaging technician Carl Norman in 2018.

Catalogue records for the maps are available on Explore the British Library, and the collection was digitised in partnership with Ritsumeikan University in 2019 (and can be viewed on their MapWarper here).

The key aims for this placement are the enhancement of the maps’ cataloguing data. This will include collecting key physical and cartographic information from the maps, such as dimensions and annotations, that have not previously been recorded, and improving terminology and adding translations to improve the collection’s discoverability. There will be opportunities to write and research, work with curators and British Library staff from a variety of areas, gain insights and training, and receive some strong learning and development experiences.

Once again, the deadline for applications is this Friday at 5pm. For further details go here and scroll down to download the full project profile.

I recently participated in a discussion panel with the LivingMaps network as part of the launch of their ‘'New Directions in Radical Cartography: why the map is never the territory’. Edited by Prof Phil Cohen and Dr Mike Duggan, this edited collection brings together 20 examples of contemporary research, artwork and theory from across the world under the label counter-mapping or radical cartography. 

Cohen & Duggan (eds), New Directions in Radical Cartography. Cover image by Linda Knight, Inefficient Mapping, 2020 https://lindaknight.org/inefficient-mapping/

The definition of counter-mapping and radical cartography was a question that formed much of the discussion. Counter-mapping, described in depth in the book, is a process which really began in the 1970s following a realisation that regular or normative maps were perhaps not as democratic or utilitarian as assumed, and appeared to favour certain groups over others. Maps such as those by William Bunge and the Pluto Press aimed to readdress the balance.

Radical mapping, according to Phil Cohen’s introduction to the book, moves things along. Firstly, many of the examples in the book are not ‘maps’ in the way that many of us appreciate them (though they are perfectly consistent with other cultures’ mapping). The maps are community workshops, walking tours, audio-led immersive guides, poetry and reading, contemporary archaeology GiS, multi-media, memory palaces and more. Yet all of them can be understood as mapping in some way, if you believe that mapping doesn’t necessarily always lead towards the creation of a map.

That seems pretty radical to me. There’s also a sense of radical-ness in what the mappings are doing. For example, they are user-led and generated as opposed to being created by professional map companies or agencies. They are also open-ended and unfinished – incredibly radical if you are used to thinking of a map as a tangible object. They also, often in very quiet ways, articulate the voices of groups who do not usually shout very loudly on traditional maps - children, the elderly, and migrants. Quietly radical, if there is such a thing.

Critical cartography is a developing area of the academic discipline of cultural studies. As ‘post-representational’ mappings, this work is not collected by the British Library (in the same way that GiS is not collected). However, early maps are used creatively by artists and academics affiliated to critical cartography. For example, digitised British Library maps were included in Hakeem Adam and Maxwell Mutanda’s One Fifth of the Earth’s Surface project which was featured in last years York AND festival. And whilst not from the Library’s collection, map based artworks included in Claire Reddelman’s Postcards from the Bagne demonstrate just how successful the use of early maps in artistic and cultural practice can be.

Integrating early maps, digitally or physically, into a multi-layered multi-sensory perception of places in time known as deep mapping (as, for example, described by Dr Stuart Dunn in A History of Space in the Digital Age), is another of the key ways in which maps contribute to cutting-edge research and continue to be, in every sense, living maps.

The India Office map catalogue of 1878, now released online for the first time on the British Library Shared Research Repository, is a valuable finding aid to one of the world's most complex and mercurial map collections.

The title page of the 1878 map catalogue, and a further page with numerous crossings-out

The catalogue of manuscript and printed reports, field books, memoirs, maps, etc., of the Indian Surveys, deposited in the map room of the India office, compiled by Sir Clements Markham (1830-1916), was the first published listing of the working map archive of British East India Company, and the administration of British India from London. As the title suggests, it contains a wide variety of geographical materials, from maps to written sources and much else. Its principal geographical focus – about 70% of it - is upon the area of modern India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Burma, but it also takes in adjacent areas, and more generally British imperial activity across the world, with the bulk of the material dating from the 19th and early 20th centuries.

In 1947 the collection, along with the rest of the India Office Records, passed into the care of the Commonwealth Office (various iterations), and in 1982 was deposited with the British Library.

Diagram showing the administrative descent of the India Office Records

As late as the 1970s the catalogue was still being used to manage the map collection; the copy we have released is the one used by archivists to record the multiple changes to the map collection that had occurred between 1878 and 1947. These changes include annotations and inserted leaves listing maps that were added to the collection after 1878, and crossings-out of material that had been removed. These latter include material relating to the Great Trigonometrical Survey which was sent to the Survey of India in 1924, and large-scale maps and plans for infrastructure projects sent to Indian provincial public works departments.

'Mapp of the Mallabar coast & of the costa di Pescaria'… 1705. IOR/X/331

Catalogue extract showing the entry for IOR/X/331

The catalogue is an indispensable aid for researchers looking to identify historical geographical sources for India and South Asia, and to order material to view onsite in the Library’s reading rooms. The ‘X’ numbers – the modern pressmarks or 'call numbers' for each unit (the material accessioned up to 1878 has the number range IOR/X/1 to IOR/X/4999), can be entered into the ‘request other items’ page of Explore the British Library under the Asia, Pacific and African Collection subset. There is also an incredibly useful alphabetical index to facilitate searching. 

The catalogue is also valuable evidence of the history of the role of maps and geographical materials in the government of British India, and of imperial map archives in general. The arrangement and contents inform us of the particular mindsets  and priorities of the administration (inevitably, the focus and dates of maps in the archive broadly matches Company and administration activity) and how these shifted over time. 

We hope you find this a useful resource, and would be very glad to receive feedback on the sorts of ways you are making use of it in your research. You can read more about the research repository, and explore other resources available there.

Tom Harper

@BLMaps

In October 2020 we released 17,000 images of maps and views from George III’s Topographical Collection on the images-sharing site Flickr Commons, which seems to have kept you busy. 

Well, from today, you can find an additional 32,000 images, comprising George III’s collection of atlases and albums of views, plans, diagrams, reports and surveys, produced between 1550 and 1820. These have been uploaded to Flickr with a Public Domain attribution for you to search, browse, download, reuse, study and enjoy.

Jan Baptista Vrients, Descriptio Germaniae Inferioris, 1602. 118.e.16.

 What have we added?

So much! Here are some highlights:

Complete cover-to-cover digitisation of major 16^th, 17^th and 18^th century atlases by Joan Blaeu (lots of Blaeu), Jan Janssonius (again, lots of Jansson), Abraham Ortelius (a few Ortelius atlases here), Jodocus and Henricus Hondius, John Speed,  Moses Pitt, Thomas Jefferys, Mary Anne Rocque, Nicolas Sanson, Pierre du Val, Herman Moll and others. Most have never been released in their entirety anywhere online before.

Albums of topographical views by artists such as John Webber, Robert Havell, Thomas Daniell and John Clerk.

Multi-sheet maps in loose or bound format including Turgot’s plan of Paris,  Morgan’s map of London, Peter Andre’s Essex, Fry & Jefferson’s Virginia, Pratt’s Ireland and Müller’s Bohemia.

Albums of 16^th century prints and drawings of Roman architecture and antiquities assembled by Cassiano dal Pozzo. 

Many manuscript atlases including work by Carlo Fontana, Francesco Basilicata's 1612 survey of Crete, and two Kangxi atlases of China.

Bernard Ratzer, A plan of the city of New York..., published London, Thomas Jefferys, 1776. Maps 1.TAB.44.

 How can you access them?

Via Flickr

The first release of 17,000 images - the collection of individual maps and views,  was released in one big bundle. It made sense to release this disparate group of items this way, but we appreciate that searching Flickr for specific images is not especially easy (see below, Explore, for a solution. Of course, it can be interesting to browse if you are not sure where you want to end up!).

Responding to your feedback, this second release has organised the bound atlases and volumes of prints into separate albums. The images within the albums retain the order in which they are encountered in the physical copy.  The titles of the albums are made up of the constituent volume's author, title, date and shelfmark, so we hope this will make the searching experience a good one. Batching into 500 or fewer images will make downloading easier for you too.

Via Explore

Every image on Flickr is accompanied by metadata which includes a link to the corresponding British Library Explore catalogue record. The links are reciprocal, meaning that you can search for specific items via Explore (key tip: add ‘George III’ to your search term (free text) in order to bring up only maps and views in the K.Top). When you have found the record for the item you require (look for the record for the volume or album, rather than the record for an individual map of view within that volume, which will not contain the digital link), select ‘I Want this’ and then ‘View Digital Item’, which will take you to the relevant image(s) on Flickr.  

Pierre Jartoux, [Twenty-two maps of the provinces of China]. Beijing, after 1717. 118.d.15.

 Anything else?

We hope you will find everything to your liking. However, as with any large release of digital images, you may encounter the odd hiccup for which we apologise. Please get in touch with us and we’ll do our best to put it right.

Although Flickr Commons now includes pretty much everything from the Topographical Collection, there is a small handful of images which we have still to release. We're working on it!

In due course, all of this content will become available on the British Library’s own dedicated Universal Viewer, while a dataset of the entire collection will also be released on the British Library's research repository.

We are keen to hear how you are using it so please let us know and provide feedback via social media @BLMaps or by emailing us at [email protected].

Finally, a word of thanks to our colleagues at British Library Labs for their tireless perfectionism and dedication in developing these Flickr pages.

Now off you go and explore.