From a port settlement on the banks of the Thames that the Romans called Londinium came a thriving city of “roughly 100,000 people” in Shakespeare’s time, “a cross-section of early modern English culture,” the British Library notes, including “royalty, nobility, merchants, artisans, laborers, actors, beggars, thieves, and spies, as well as refugees from political and religious persecution on the continent.” The city thrived economically and merchants from the known world passed through its ports. “As a result, Londoners would hear a variety of accents and languages as they strolled about the city — a chorus of voices from across Europe and from all walks of life.”

The chorus of voices became a cacophony for many Londoners in the following century who resurrected a pastoral ideal and/or retired to the countryside in the 1600s. The city swelled to a population of around half a million. “It is also a period during which a high proportion of London’s inhabitants were migrants,” writes the Proceedings of the Old Bailey. “It was only by maintaining this constant influx that the capital could possibly maintain its population growth,” slow as it was. “London’s population in this period was also characterized by its diversity,” and by stagnation as plague and fire devastated the city throughout the century.

The city’s cosmopolitan communities grew as England became a colonial world power. Neoclassical art and architecture beautified the city’s new wealth, and along with wealth came poverty, overcrowding, immiseration, and crime. “Here malice, rapine, accident, conspire;  and now a rabble, now a fire,” wrote Samuel Johnson in “London,” (1738), a poem written in imitation of Juvenal’s satire on Imperial Rome. In his “London” over half a century later, William Blake saw “marks of weakness, marks of woe” on every face he met in the city — beginning a protest tradition that reached its zenith during the massive population growth in Dickens’ time, and found new voice in glam, punk, grime, etc.

People have come from all over the world to make their home in London for centuries. Each wave of migrants has had to navigate the city’s class hierarchies — through plagues, fires, the Blitz, strikes, riots, protests, more fires, Brexit…. London has burned, “London is drowning,” sang Joe Strummer. But London remains, a megacity of nearly 9 million. In the video above, you can see the city’s growth mapped over a period of 2,000 years, from the Romans to the Saxons; from Tudor to Stuart, early and late Georgian, early and late Victorian, and into the wartorn 20th century.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

At a casual glance, some travelers may take the map above for a depiction of France’s enviable intercity high-speed rail network Train à Grande Vitesse, better known as TGV. In reality, its content predates that system’s inauguration in the early 1980s — and by nearly two millennia at that. This is in fact a map of Gaul, a region of Europe that, most broadly defined, included modern-day France, Luxembourg, and Belgium, as well as parts of Switzerland, Italy, the Netherlands, and Germany. Ruled by Rome for five centuries until the fall of the Roman Empire itself, Gaul was run through with a number of Roman roads, a subject of fascination for many archaeologically inclined historians.

They’ve also become a subject of fascination for a young data scientist and graphic designer by the name of Sasha Trubetskoy. His work, much featured here on Open Culture, includes maps of the Roman Roads of Britain, Italy, Spain and Portugal, as well as, at a larger scale, those of the entire empire.

“This was an interesting map to make, but I can’t say it was fun all the time,” writes Trubetskoy. “Generally I enjoyed the process, but it was far more challenging than I had anticipated.” You can hear him describe some of the challenges involved, and even show how solving them played out in his design process, in his three-hour explanatory live stream now archived on Youtube.

You can download Trubetskoy’s Roman Roads of Gaul map from his site, and even buy a high-resolution file suitable for printing as a poster (USD $9). “As far as I can tell, it’s done,” writes Trubetskoy of the work, wisely — or from frustrating personal experience — acknowledging that, despite or because of the centuries of distance between us and the relevant historical and geographical facts, those facts could still change. Just as ancient history cannot both make its way to us and maintain absolutely perfect fidelity to the past, so the kind of practical visual design embodied in a subway map necessitates a great deal of simplification and approximation to be useful. And speaking of the graphic arts, just imagine how useful this particular map would’ve been to Asterix.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

Most of us do not, today, live in desperate need of maps. On the internet we can easily find not only the current maps we need to navigate most any territory on Earth, but also an increasing proportion of all the maps made before as well. You can find the latter in places like the David Rumsey Map Collection, which, as we wrote last year here on Open Culture, now boasts 91,000 historic maps free to download.  It will surely add even more, as humanity seems to have only just begun digitizing its own many attempts to make the physical world legible, an art that goes back (as you know if you read the University of Chicago’s The History of Cartography online) to prehistoric Lascaux cave paintings of the night sky.

By that standard, the maps currently being digitized and uploaded by the British Library are downright modern — or early modern, to be more specific. Dating between 1500 and 1824, says Medievalists.net, these maps “are part of the Topographical Collection of King George III (K. Top),” which also includes “maps, atlases, architectural drawings, cartoons and watercolors.”

Part of “the larger King’s Library which was presented to the Nation by George IV in 1823,” the collection was amassed “during the formative period of the British Empire” and thus shows “how Britain viewed and interacted with the wider world during this period.”

The British Library plans to post 40,000 of these maps (broadly considered), and you can now view the first set of roughly 18,000 at the institution’s Flickr Commons collection. Medievalists.net names as highlights of the full Topographical Collection of King George III such artifacts as “a hand-drawn map of New York City, presented to the future James II in 1664,” “The vast Kangxi Map of China of 1719 made by the Italian Jesuit Matteo Ripa,” “the earliest comprehensive land-use map of London from 1800,” and even “watercolors by noted 18th century artists such as Paul Sandby and Samuel Hieronymus Grimm.”

Many of the pieces the British Library has thus far uploaded to Flickr look like maps to us still today, but just as many, perhaps most, strike us more as works of art. This goes for traditional bird’s-eye-views rendered more vividly (and sometimes imaginatively) than we’re used to, as well for as richly drawn or even painted landscapes, all of which exist to provide a faithful representation of land, sea, and sky. You can view more such images along that spectrum, as well as read their stories in context, at the British Library’s Picturing Places site. The artistic and historical richness exuded by these maps today echoes the more tangible value they had when first created: back then, those who had the maps possessed the world.

via Medievalist.net

Related Content:

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The History of Cartography, “the Most Ambitious Overview of Map Making Ever Undertaken,” Is Free Online

The British Library Puts 1,000,000 Images into the Public Domain, Making Them Free to Reuse & Remix

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.