UK road map circa 1675
Strange Maps has this lovely antique map of London circa 1675, created by an adventurous man named John Ogilby:
The life of John Ogilby (1600-1676) can be qualified without exaggeration as rather eventful. He freed his father from debtors' prison by buying a winning lottery ticket, founded a dance school in London and later Dublin's Theatre Royal, got shipwrecked on his return from Ireland, produced a very successful English verse transaltion of Virgil, lost all his property in the Great Fire of London (1666), and towards the end of his life managed to produce the Britannia Atlas (1675), considered to be the first road atlas of Britain.
The atlas, which housed a series of road maps like this one used for traveling through the UK way back when, is apparently also responsible for setting the 1,760-yards-to-a-mile standard. A web site dedicated to Priddy's Hard, an area in Hampshire, England, has this and other old school maps worth checking out if you're a closet road geek like me.
Scroll Britannia: the UK's First Road Map via Strange Maps
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I'm finding it Priddy Hard to read... ;D
I thought the statute mile was defined in 1592 by Elizabeth.
Amazing - follow the link furthr and you can expand it - London is so empty and yet the names are the same - You can see fields and farming in the middle of say Knightsbridge - Blew my little mind and makes me want to be able to zip back in time and see what the topography was like.
Really good series on map making "Map Man" BBC covered this in Series One ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map_Man
That's not London, it's a road map from London to Land's End (Cornwall), so going south-west. It's explained in the Strange Maps entry - for instance, the first strip on the left goes westward along the Thames.
MM
Transblawg
So does this mean that AAA doesn't have a patent on the TripTik?
1675 = pre-Act of Union = no UK
This is an English map.
They look like the maps that were covered by Terry Jones fom Monty Python in Terry Jones' Great Map Mystery on BBC2 last year.
Canal maps (Nicholsons waterways guides especially) are still made in this format.
#8 They sure are - that programme covered routes from John Ogilby's Britannia
Should be noted that cycle (and walking) maps are sometimes still set out like this (i.e. the top and bottom of the maps are pointing the direction you will mostly be travelling in). Still the best map layout when the route to be used is mostly linear with few diversions.