Stock Id :16325

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Early road map of the roads from London to Stilton in Cambridgeshire

OGILBY, John.

The Road from London to Barwick...
London, c.1675, second state. Coloured. 330 x 445mm.

A first sheet of five showing the roads from London to Berwick-on-Tweed, reaching Stilton in Cambridgeshire (then in Huntingdonshire), following the modern A1, via Tottenham, Ware & Huntingdon.
Plate 29 from Ogilby's 'Britannia', the first national road-atlas of any country in Western Europe. It was composed of maps of seventy-three major roads and cross-roads, presented as trompe-l'oeil scrolls, each with a decorative title cartouche, this being one of only four featuring the way-wiser. It was the first English atlas on a uniform scale, at one inch to a mile, and the 'mile' Ogilby used became the national standard, the statute mile of 1,760 yards. Ogilby claimed that 26,600 miles of roads were surveyed in the course of preparing the atlas, on foot pushing a surveyor's wheel, but only about 7,500 were actually depicted in print. It was only after the 'Britannia' that roads started being shown on county maps.


Stock ID : 16325

£280

£280

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Stock Id :16325

Download Image

Early road map of the roads from London to Stilton in Cambridgeshire

OGILBY, John.

The Road from London to Barwick...
London, c.1675, second state. Coloured. 330 x 445mm.

A first sheet of five showing the roads from London to Berwick-on-Tweed, reaching Stilton in Cambridgeshire (then in Huntingdonshire), following the modern A1, via Tottenham, Ware & Huntingdon.
Plate 29 from Ogilby's 'Britannia', the first national road-atlas of any country in Western Europe. It was composed of maps of seventy-three major roads and cross-roads, presented as trompe-l'oeil scrolls, each with a decorative title cartouche, this being one of only four featuring the way-wiser. It was the first English atlas on a uniform scale, at one inch to a mile, and the 'mile' Ogilby used became the national standard, the statute mile of 1,760 yards. Ogilby claimed that 26,600 miles of roads were surveyed in the course of preparing the atlas, on foot pushing a surveyor's wheel, but only about 7,500 were actually depicted in print. It was only after the 'Britannia' that roads started being shown on county maps.


Stock ID : 16325

£280

£280

Return To Listing