An early map of the roads of Essex and Kent

OGILBY, John.

The Road from Chelmsford in Essex to Maldon/Raleigh/Gravesend... With the branch from Canterbury to Deal...
London, c.1675. Coloured. 330 x 445mm.

Three short routes from Chelmsford, in turn to Malden, Raleigh and Gravesend. Then the route from Canterbury via Sandwich to Deal then on to Dover.
Plate 93 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, in this case Poseidon and Venus in chariots drawn by sea horses and sea monsters. 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 using the surveyor's wheel depicted in the cartouche, but only about 7,500 were actually depicted in print. It was only after the 'Britannia' that roads started being shown on county maps.

Second state, with plate number bottom right.
Stock ID : 15103