The Library’s unique collection of Ordnance Surveyors’ Drawings is now available under new terms, making the maps freely accessible and usable in digital tools.

The Ordnance Surveyors’ Drawings (OSDs), compiled between 1789 and c.1840, represent the first continuous topographic mapping of England and Wales and are the most detailed record of the landscape preceding full-scale industrialisation in the mid-19th century. These original manuscript maps, drawn primarily at scales of ca. 1:21,120 and 1:31,680, with coastal areas of military significance at ca. 1:10,560, depict the whole of Wales and England south of an east-west Preston-Hull line.

Detail of OSD 267(pt.2). Ordnance Surveyors’ Drawings. Boyce, draughtsman. 1814

Though these ink-on-paper drawings formed the cartographic basis for the first published Ordnance Survey one-inch mapping, they contain topographic details not captured in the smaller-scale, printed series. The detail above of the 1814 OSD 267(pt.2) was drawn at a scale of two-inches-to-the-mile and indicates field boundaries, land cover, water courses, relief, roads and footpaths, and built features, including the presence of stone walls, drawn here in red.

Detail of Sheet 64. Ordnance Survey,  Old series,  First ed.  1:63,360. 1824

In contrast, the published sheet above in the First Ed (Old Series), printed in 1824 and based on the OSD, was by necessity generalised, due to the smaller scale (one-inch-to-the-mile) and limitation to black-and-white. 

The OSDs were georeferenced in 2012, and partly as a result of the immense success of that public crowdsourcing effort – BL Georeferencer - scanned images of the maps have been “opened up” for reuse under an Open Government Licence. A small sample of four OSD images have been posted to Wikimedia Commons here. The remaining 400 or so will follow; if you wish to be notified when it is complete, contact [email protected]

Another exciting development with these maps is their inclusion in British Library Labs, a new project supporting research and development with BL digital data that offers direct curatorial and financial support, including an expenses-paid residency at the British Library. We are hoping that researchers and developers with an interest in cartographic history and geospatial data will participate, and we'll see these maps put to new and dynamic uses online!

A few months after the launch of ‘Off the Map,’ a higher education competition in which university design students use videogame technology to create immersive 3d versions of historic maps, the first work has started appearing on various blogs by the competitors. See them here and here.

As you’ll recall, a number of British Library maps and views were supplied as digital images for competitors to meld, merge and adapt using Crytek’s ‘Cryengine 3’ software.

But of the three choices – the Pyramids, the Tower of London, Stonehenge – London has definitely proven the most popular. As I may well have something to do with the final decision I can’t really express a preference. But for one group, the activity and bustle of people present in the foreground of some of the London prints - particularly Visscher's 1616 panorama below, is of particular relevance to their creation of an authentic environment. To them, it is as much about the atmosphere, the noise, the activity, as it is the buildings and the layout.

C.J. Visscher, Londinum florentissima Britanniae urbs...Amsterdam, 1616 (detail)

Maps C.5.a.6.

Because a city is more than simply the dimensions of its spaces.

They are not alone. For the makers of town plans and views of the 16th and 17th centuries, these features were also of crucial importance in conveying something of the power, wealth and humanity of a city.

As anyone living in a city knows, the layout is only part of the story. This is one of the main reasons why 'Off the Map' makes such appropriate use of historical maps and views. It is the rounded picture, the combination of plan, perspective, viewpoint, but also movement, sound, which together creates a convincing surrogate of place and through it, the means to understand it better. 

Visscher (detail) Maps C.5.a.6.

This is more a news update than anything else, to say that some amazing stuff has gone on this week with BL Georeferencer, our online crowdsourcing project for placing historic maps at http://www.bl.uk/maps/

In less than *three* days from the lauch (four from the "soft" launch of social media leaks!), all of the 781 historic maps we put online for georeferencing were completed using the BL Georeferencer tool. Participants captured spatial metadata about the maps so that they may now be seached and viewed using popular geographic web tools, eg Google Earth and Old Maps Online, and data (OSM, OS OpenData). 

 

So before I head off to a training session, I wanted to say "thank you" to the volunteers who gave their time to sort out where all these maps belonged. I know from my familiarity with this collection that finding the places depicted often required plenty of patience, online research and a spatial sense!

-kimberly

 

Like many I enjoyed watching Stargazing Live on BBC TV recently. Live televised astronomy is a risky business, especially in the UK where the odd cloud does tend to appear occasionally, obscuring what lies behind it, and with it the entire point of the programme. Clear night skies last week therefore constituted almost supernaturally good fortune.

Very few of the participants huddling round their refractors had any star charts alongside them. Star maps do assist stargazing, but they exist usually at one remove since they are not very legible in the dark. Until relatively recently when star chart smart phone apps with special ‘night mode’ settings came along (red, so as not to alter the eye's adjustment to the dark), there wasn’t really any way round this, despite inventive solutions in charts such as white on black printing. Clearly nobody thought of using glow-in-the-dark ink.

Christian Goldbach, Adler, Antinous, Pfeil, Fuchs, Delphin, from Neuester Himmels-Atlas …, Weimar, 1799 [British Library Shelfmark 50.i.16.]

For the majority of amateur astronomers, locating a star or planet is done via a combination of prior research (using the brilliant Philip's Planisphere), dead reckoning and guesswork, or else allowing the telescope's computer star catalogue to find the star itself. The function of a celestial chart or celestial globe has always been instructive and educational, far more than it was practical.

Celestial globes and many charts are completely useless for matching up against the night sky, because they show the sky 'back-to-front.' They are conceptual models. The ‘celestial sphere’ was thought by the ancients as a giant globe encasing our solar system, with the ‘fixed’ stars as points upon it. Our viewpoint is as one outside the globe looking in, not inside looking out. So, utterly useless for matching up with the night sky, but utterly brilliant for making sense of the whole thing.

John Senex, A new caelestial globe... London: John Martin, 1757 (detail )[British Library shelfmark: Maps G.22.a]                                                                            

Pocket globes, with the celestial sphere on the inside of the case, visualise it even better.

John Senex, A New & Correct Globe of the Earth. London, c.1730 [British Library shelfmark: Maps C.4.a.3.(6.)]

Andreas Cellarius, Hemisphaerii borealis coeli et terrae. Amsterdam: Jan Janssonius, 1660 [British Library shelfmark: Maps C.6.c.2.]

The idea of a celestial sphere, excellently shown on a flat page by Cellarius in 1660, continues to be a great model of how it all works. So much for explaining the concept of the celestial sphere. But what about the important stuff like how to know where north is, or what time it is, by looking up at the sky from a viewpoint of the middle of the sea in the middle of night? Important stuff if one’s life depended upon it.

Thomas Hood, North celestial hemisphere published in The Use of the Celestial Globe in Plano … London, 1590 [British Library shelfmark: Maps 184..h.1]

And that may be the key to it. Astronomy is merely now a hobby for most, albeit Britain's national one. The first star charts printed in the UK, by Thomas Hood in 1590, accompanied a little navigational teaching manual for sailors. These showed the sky back-to-front too, but the imaginative leap seems not to have been as difficult then as it is for many of us now.   

Tom Harper

I’ve been struggling all week to find something Christmassy in a map to write about. The Ortelius map of Russia has some people riding on a sleigh, but it doesn't quite fit the bill. Then I found a map with a Nativity scene in it and there was, as they say, much rejoicing.

The scene is, rather unsurprisingly, in a map of Palestine/ the Holy Land, of which many were produced over the years. The earliest pre-1500 printed local maps, in fact, are pretty much all of Palestine. These aren't simply maps, but map pictures containing the Biblical narrative in the form of text and small vignettes placed in their scripturally correct locations.

The map was a framework in which the narratives could take place. Great for children, the illiterate, those wishing to conduct a virtual pilgrimage as a form of penance. It is a bit strange the Nativity doesn't feature more. Partly, I think, the Old Testament tended to take precedence, being far more of a geographical narrative than the New, but the fact is that the Nativity was subordinate in importance to a number of of other narratives, especially the Passion.

But also, the problem is that if you want to show this level of illustration, you need to make the map pretty big. Big maps are often more expensive, and more likely to get damaged, like this damaged thing.

It is by a publisher called Thompson, produced in around 1795 for what at that time was an increasingly lucrative educational market. Originally it would have been intended for a Sunday School wall, which is probably why it is so beaten up, by which we may assume it to have been well used, and successful. This is emphatically NOT the same sort of map product as Breydenbach's gorgeous Holy Land view of 1486, though it shares many similar features.

This close up shows the group of nativity scenes, Wise Men entering stage left, the Flight into Egypt stage right,  A stable and the Massacre of the Innocents, one of Herod’s soldiers dangling a baby. No great work of art – a crude woodcut – but everything is there, the sheep, the star, conjured up with primitive beauty.

There are far more vivid nativity scenes, of course, in galleries and churches, but where the map format triumphed was in its ability to show as many things as possible in one frame. Often the vignette scenes were copied – albeit often clumsily – from reproductions of famous works. Such maps also had a social purpose and an effect which we are able to understand through looking at them as objects, not just for the images they contain.

The British Library’s Cartographic Department has added another couple of octopus maps to its collection, and it is doubtful the Octopus Appreciation Society will be any more pleased with them than any of the others.

It is the unlucky fate of this queasy cephalopod (thanks Wikipedia) to assume a form which encapsulates perfectly all the greedy, amorphous, appropriating, hoardy traits of mankind. First used in Fred Rose’s 1870s Serio-Comic map of Europe to emphasise the multifarious designs of Russia, the octopus became a very popular device in political illustration the world over, representing nations (Russia, Japan, Britain) ther leaders (Churchill), their money (the dollar), and how they got it (property rents, below, from around 1925).

And let's not forget Falmouth, that greedy conniving Cornish town, jealously eyeing up the port and surrounding area with their rateable population and exploitable acreage of land.

 The reason for this particular bust-up is probably the Municipal Corporations Act of 1882, government legislation which gave town (borough) councils like Falmouth extra powers over surrounding areas, and provided government grants to buy up land. Within sight of Falmouth were the docks, levies from cargo, a piece of the developing tourist trade, according to those on the opposite side, anything it could get its tentacles around. 

Printed in London by Thomas Olver (c. 1882) the map gives us a great insight into tensions between town and country during the late 19th century. The relentless urban expansion is not often seen from the point of view of the rural outskirts, nor the effects of this expansion and legislation upon the dynamic of smaller urban centres and their surroundings. It probably isn't the only town to have been given the octopus treatment.

Anthropomorphic qualities sometimes only go so far. Far from being the aggressor, the terrifying sea monster of old, this one looks like he just wants to escape into the chilly Cornish sea, and who can blame him.

 

Today I was visited by Neill and Anna Hill.  Anna is the descendant of Robert Dawson through her mother while her father was the last director of OS when it was still entirely staffed by the military!  I showed her one Ordnance Surveyors' Drawing drawn by Dawson showing the countryside around Stratford on Avon and another showing Snowdonia in 1816.  The latter is regarded by some as his masterpiece because of his sensitive rendering of the mountain peaks - a sensitivity which many have linked to the romanticism of the period and thus a cartographic equivalent of the poems of Wordsworth and the paintings of Turner.

All the maps in this latest round of BL Georeferencer were completed yesterday, 1 Nov, thus producing second lot of of the Library's historic maps that know where they belong. A related result was the amicable conclusion of the weeklong point leapfrogging between the two top participants, Sue White and Maurice Nicholson.

A heartfelt "thank you" to Sue and Maurice for their dedicated work! In what must have been mutual design or compromise, each contributed precisely 3,300 points over the course of the six days. This impressive number is evident in the high quality of the georeferencing they produced, and will be enjoyed by users overlaying the maps in future. 

This Christopher Saxton map of Kent, Sussex, Middlesex and Surrey was assigned a mind-boggling 398 points, more than any other map!

A quarter of the maps were georeferenced with 3-5 points, with more than half of the maps sporting between 6 and 30 points. Less - ~18% - have between 30 and 100 points at present, such as this 1928 OS map of the south west coast of Wales (38 points).

Thanks to all the volunteers that assisted in the BL Georeferencer effort. We will see their work added to Old Maps Online in future, where maps from numerous collections can be searched geographically and by time. Before that, however, we have some error-checking that I'll be looking for help with... stay tuned!