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Chapter 7
TOWN PLANS
For a variety of reasons town plans were comparatively late comers in the long history of cartography. In the Middle Ages populations of the most notable cities were surprisingly small and it is likely that Amsterdam, Antwerp and Nuremberg - to take a few names at random - had no more than about 20,000 inhabitants in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and it has been estimated that even late Elizabethan London embraced only some 100-150,000 people which was probably about ten times as many as any other English city at that time. Travellers were few and such major buildings as existed were built over many decades, so that the layout of even the larger cities scarcely changed from generation to generation. In consequence there was little need for planned guidance in the form expected today.
Before printed plans became available, the compilers of early manuscript maps of the countryside made use of pictorial symbols in elevation, based on the outline of well-known buildings, to distinguish town from town. Those on Matthew Paris's maps of about the year 1250 are particularly attractive and left the traveller in no doubt of the landmarks on his route. The 'Gough' map, too, by the use of different symbols and colours, distinguished between cathedral cities, monastic foundations and ordinary towns and villages. Very often on manuscript maps and portulan charts there were picturesque vignettes of capital cities and places of note inset in any space available.
Not until the late fifteenth century, as a result of the wider dissemination of books and documents made possible by movable-type printing, do we find printed topographical works containing town views in any number. The first, a very rare volume called Sanctarum Peregrinationum by Bernhard von Breydenbach, printed in Mainz in 1486, covering a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, contained woodcut views of Jerusalem, Venice and other places on the route. Still rare, but more commonly seen, is the Nuremberg Chronicle (1493) about which we have written at greater length in Chapter 4. The illustration shown there is of a town view in the style typical of the time. Thereafter, for most of the sixteenth century, German cartographers led the way in producing town plans in a more modern sense. In 1544 Sebastian Munster issued in Basle his Cosmographia containing about sixty plans and views, some in plan form, but many still using the old type of outline in elevation, and still others in bird's-eye view. Very soon afterwards Frans Hogenberg, who engraved maps for Ortelius, together with another noted engraver of the time, Georg Hoefnagel, compiled and issued in Cologne a City Atlas intended as a companion work to the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum. Entitled Civitates Orbis Terrarum and edited by Georg Braun, the six volumes of this famous work were issued between the years 1572 and 1618 and contained in all more than 500 plans including the following in the British Isles:
- 1572 London
- 1575 Cambridge, Oxford/Windsor Castle
- 1581 Norwich, Bristol, Chester, Edinburgh
- 1588 Canterbury
- 1598 Palace of Nonsuch
- 1618 Exeter/York/Shrewsbury/Lancaster/Richmond/Dublin/Galway/Limerick/Cork
The Atlas provides a fascinating sixteenth-century picture of the principal cities and towns in Europe, Asia, Africa and even America and records details of public buildings, heraldic devices and rural and domestic scenes, besides many street names. Towns are usually shown in bird's-eye view, set in picturesque and romantic backgrounds with figures of inhabitants in local dress placed boldly in the foreground. Although some of them had been included in the earlier works already mentioned, in a great many instances these were the first views to appear in print. The Braun and Hogenberg plates eventually passed to Jan Jansson who reissued the plans in Amsterdam in 1657, having removed the costumed figures which, of course, by this time were no longer of contemporary interest. Further issue details are given in Chapter 12.
Meanwhile, in England, a plan of Norwich had been drawn in 1559 by Wm Cunningham; of London, about the same time, probably by a Flemish artist; and of Cambridge in 1574 by Richard Lyne, this being the earliest engraved town plan by an Englishman. Towards the end of the century the pace of development was quickening and plans of London by Valegio (c. 1580), Norden (1593) and Munster (1598) exist. It is, however, to John Speed that we owe our knowledge of the layout of over seventy towns shown as insets on the maps in his Atlas published in 1610-11. Some of these were based on manuscript plans in William Smith's Description of England prepared in 1588, and others by Norden, but many were the result of his own travels and surveys throughout the country.
For the next 150 years or so, the work of Braun and Hogenberg and Speed formed the basis of practically all town plans in this country. Many of the maps issued by Kitchin, Bowen, Jefferys and others in the 1700's contained inset plans and vignettes of county towns and other places of importance but until the latter half of that century towns, excluding London, of course, were still comparatively small and plans tended to be decorative rather than useful. Not until well into the nineteenth century were comprehensive series of town plans on a good scale published. For maps of London, which are too numerous to note here, reference should be made to Printed Maps of London, Circa 1553-1850 by Darlington and Howgego, who have covered the subject exhaustively. The sheer size and rate of growth of London called for more frequent resurveying and mapping than elsewhere, especially after the Great Fire. Maps of particular interest are those by Wenceslaus Hollar (1655, 1664, 1666, c. 1675) before and after the Fire, by John Ogilby and William Morgan (1676), William Morgan (1681-82) and John Rocque (1746 and other editions).
We note below some of the more important works relating to British towns published up to about 1850.
FRANCOIS DE BELLEFOREST
- 1575 La Ville de Londres: Paris
FRANCESCO VALEGIO (VALESO)
- 1595-1600 London, Bristol, Cambridge, Canterbury, Chester, Norwich, Edinburgh: Venice
D. MEISSNER
- 1623 Bristol, Norwich
- 1637 Nuremberg in Sciographia Cosmka Bristol, Carlisle, Chester, Exeter, Hull, Norwich, Oxford, Windsor, Cork, Edinburgh
MATTHEW MERIAN
- 1642-72 Topographia: Frankfurt-am-Main London*, Dover, Oxford, Edinburgh*, Londonderry (*panoramic views)
WENCESLAUS HOLLAR
- 1640 Hull, Oxford
SAXTON (WEB)
- 1645 Inset plans of Berwick, Hull and York on revised Saxton County Maps
RUTGER HERMANNIDES
- 1661 Britannia Magna: Amsterdam 31 plans mostly based on Speed. This was the first book devoted entirely to plans of British cities
MANESSON MALLET
- 1683 Description de L'Univers, Paris
- 1685 Description de L'Uniners, Frankfurt London, Edinburgh, Dublin
SAXTON/PHILIP LEA
- 1689-93 Revised editions of Saxton's maps incorporating Speed's plans: London
VINCENZO CORONELLI
- 1706 Teatro della Guerra, Vol. III Inghilterra: Venice. Maps based on Braun and Hogenberg and Speed
JOHN KIP
- 1720 Britannia Illustrata London, Edinburgh and many other cities
PIETER VAN DER AA
- 1729 Calerie Agreahle du Monde: Leyden Plans based on Braun and Hogenberg and Speed
PIERRE CHASSEREAU
- 1750-66 Plans of York
JOHN ROCQUE
- 1746 An exact survey of the Cities of London and Westminster (scale 26 in. to 1 mile)
- 1746 Environs of London
- 1748, 1751 Re-issued
- 1750 Large-scale plan of Bristol
- 1756 Large-scale plan of Dublin
- 1764 A Collection of Plans of the Principal Cities of Great Britain and Ireland
G. L. LE ROUGE
- 1759 Recueil des villes, ports d'Angleterre: Paris Plans of 17 towns
JOHN ANDREWS
- 1792 Plans of the principal cities of the world
G. COLE and J. ROPER
- 1804-10 Beauties of England and Wales Includes plans of many towns and cities
R. K. DAW5ON
- 1832 Plans of the cities and boroughs of England and Wales
- 1833-50 Collection of the Plans of the most Capital Cities in every Empire
THOMAS MOULE
- 1836 The English Counties delineated Includes many plans
JOHN TALLIS
- 1851 Illustrated Atlas Includes vignette views and about 26 town Plans