Marylebone & St Pancras from an important large-scale survey of London

HORWOOD, Richard.

[Marylebone & St Pancras.]
London: 1794-5. Two sheets conjoined, total 570 x 1010mm. Some original outline colour.

Top corners repaired.

Marylebone & St Pancras from a map that Howgego describes as the 'largest and most important London map of the eighteenth century', on a scale of 26 inches to a mile. 'The New Road from Paddington' (Euston Road) is shown from Tottenham Court Road west to Lisson Grove (birthplace of Eliza Doolittle in Shaw's 'Pygmalion). Also marked are Fitzroy Square, Warren Street, Harley Street, Baker Street and the Workhouse where the University of Westminster now stands.

There is little development north of the Euston Road, but of interest is 'Jews Harp House', a coffee house that was a hot-bed of Jacobin insurrection. William Blake refers to it and the farm shown nearby in his poem 'Jerusalem': 'The Jews-harp-house & the Green Man; / The Ponds here Boys to bathe delight: / The fields of Cows by Willans farm: Shine in Jerusalems pleasant sight'. Within twenty years both had disappeared as the area was developed as Regent's Park.

Horwood's intention was to mark each house's number (a practice started in 1735), but this was abandoned as impractical. He started his scheme in 1790, expecting to be finished by 1792: by 1794 he was apologising to his subscribers (including George III); in 1798 he received a loan of £500 from the Phoenix Fire-Office, for whom Horwood worked as a surveyor, to finish the map. However this assistance was not enough to stop Horwood dying in poverty in 1803.

HOWGEGO: 200, and pp.21-22.
Stock ID : 12668