Cartography is a small interest of mine, so I hope the brief examples here will be of interest. All the maps reproduced here represent the same area on the page: approximately 3mm by 3mm. They are to the same scale: a kilometre is the distance between the blue verticals on the fifth and final one of the series.

They are all of the small village of Kingston-near-Lewes, East Sussex, UK, which is two miles south west of my home town of Lewes. The first map is from John Ogilby's "Britannia" of 1675, which is a a collection of 100 road maps in strip form covering the whole of England and Wales.

1675 map

It has the distinction of being the first atlas to use one inch to the mile as the scale throughout. The number "51" by the road at Swanbarough marks the milepost from London. Note the spelling of Swanbarough (Swanborough in the four later maps). This reminds us that borough/burgh comes from a word for mound, and the term "barrow" is used especially in the South of England to mean a burial mound. On later maps we will see these on the hill to the left marked as "tumuli". The dots in the road mark the furlongs (eighths of a mile). The atlas is for travellers and gives all that the traveller would need: on the Newhaven road out of Lewes there is a right turn to Kingston: if you reach milepost 51, you have gone past it.

The second map is from the Ordnance Survey (OS) One-inch First Series which ran for almost the whole of the 19th century.

19-th C map

From the railways shown elsewhere this particular map was issued sometime between 1847 and 1858. They were printed from copper engravings which allow particularly fine lines to be drawn, as in the hachuring to show the gradients. The village name has (temporarily) gained an "e". Swanborough is not marked, but the individual buildings are. In the village itself, the church is marked with a cross, with vertical hachuring possibly identifying the surrounding graveyard. The colouring on the road is not part of the map: it is the crayoned trace of a journey taken in 1875 by a Samuel Nixon.

The third map is from the third series of the OS One-inch, the hachuring of the gradients has not yet been abandoned, but contours have been introduced.

1875 map

For me, this is the finest series. It still retains, close-to and at a distance, the appearance of a landscape viewed from the air but with necessary cartographic detail. Individual buildings are still shown. Hand-engraved lettering is used in different sizes and styles to differentiate between feature. This map includes "Minor corrections to May1912".

The fourth map is the last OS One-inch series and dates from 1969.

1969 map

The One-inch series was subsequently photographed, enlarged, and reissued at a scale of 1 : 50,000 (2.5cm to the kilometre) as a new "First Series". As the maps are redrawn by computer they are resissued as a "Second Series". The hachuring has gone to be replaced by more frequent contour lines. Individual buildings are no longer shown except when isolated. This is a loss at fine detail, but in the previous series as building proliferated the maps gave the appearance of having been scattered with soot. A particularly attractive feature of this series is the cream paper on which it is printed: all subsequent series have been on bright white.

The fifth and final map in this selection is the current version (2002).

current map

These can most easily be distinguished from the photo-reproduced 1 : 50,000 First Series by the heights being shown in metres and not feet, but closer examination shows many differences; not all of them improvements. The lettering is less attractive, and the greater density of contour lines leads to an arbitrary abandonment of them when they come too close together. The use of a deciduous-tree symbol on the woodland is especially pointless when the stand of trees is too narrow for it to be shown complete.