With a copy of John Rocque’s maps – his Plan of the Cities of London and Westminster and Borough of Southwark, and what is known as the ‘London Near Ten Miles Around’ – it is possible to lose oneself for hours in the streets and the country roads of Georgian London.
Here is Montagu House (now the site of the British Museum) with open fields beyond its grounds, but with the new buildings of Bloomsbury lapping up against its front door. We stroll through open fields and across long removed watercourses to get from Buckingham House to the ‘Chelsea College’ (the Royal Hospital). Should we venture further we walk through cultivated land to the new (built in 1729) wooden ‘Fulham Bridge’ at Putney and swing back through the villages of Wandsworth, Clapham and Stockwell, little more than groups of houses around junctions in country lanes.
It is a wonderful and staggering achievement, the work of the Frenchman John Rocque, who was born in Uzes in the South of France in 1704/5. Probably part of the Huguenot diaspora, he made a career as a surveyor of the country estates of rich landowners, producing plans of their landholdings for both practical uses and for display. The Plan was a huge step up for him and for surveying in general, relying on new techniques and instruments, and the intellectual and scientific ferment of 18th century London. As John Montague argues in his introduction to the maps that have just been reprinted in one volume by the London Topographical Society, the work would not have been possible without the assistance of the Royal Society and came about because of competition between Paris and London; which was the biggest city? Who was the most scientifically superior?
This was the impetus behind the Plan, a publication and an object as huge and as challenging as the survey work itself. The finished article was to be of 24 sheets which fixed together would be 13’ by 6’ (about 4m x 1.8m) at a scale of 200’ to 1” (1:2,400), and the work seems to have started in March 1737 with a publication date set for September 1740. Montague speculates that the fact that it took until 1746 for the first proofs to be shown implies that there was some major error in the initial survey (the techniques were very new, and this was substantially bigger than anything Rocque had undertaken before) which necessitated a wholesale reworking.
We catch London as it becomes the largest city in Europe, an emerging capital of culture and science, and in the middle of a construction boom, as Mayfair fills in and new garden squares appear in Bloomsbury and Marylebone. Rocque and Pine – the engraver and publisher of the 24 sheet Plan – in their 1740 Proposal (essentially their pitch document for financing), state that the time is right for a new and accurate survey because of this recent rapid growth of the city:
“This sudden vast increase of houses…will probably fix the bounds of this capital for many years to come.”
In that of course they were wrong, but their work fixes for us the capital at a moment in time; its population had doubled in the previous 100 years, it was to be three times bigger again 100 years later, beyond the imagining of the residents of the mid-18th century.
The Plan is sold on subscription, a guinea down with two guineas to pay on publication, and the book reproduces the subscription list of 245 names, 80% of whom were nobility or gentry, headed by the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Cumberland, and including the lord High Chancellor, the Lord Privy Seal, the Lord President of the Council, and more Earls, Dukes and Lords than you could shake a stick at. Although the survey was to be privately and individually funded, this was conceived as a publication of national import.
While undertaking the 24 sheet Plan, Rocque is also working on the equally ambitious survey of London and ten miles around. This is at the scale of 1” to 1000’ (1:12,000) and over 16 sheets which together measured 8’ by 6’ (2.4m x 1.8m) which covered 19 miles of ground across by 13 miles north to south. As Montague says this is “the first detailed sense of how the country villages and towns fall around the capital, how the principal roads and the finer network of lanes bind them together, and how the countryside lies between”.
Ten Miles Around is also sold on subscription, but with interesting demographic differences of those who sign up. There are far fewer aristocrats and many more professionals, and 40% of the list are tradesmen or craftsmen. One could also pay to have one’s house indicated on the map or in its index (echoed today in Google maps, where businesses pay to show on the page) so the aspiring classes could show their rising importance.
The book reproduces both the 24 sheet Plan and 16 sheet Ten Miles Around at 50% of the original size from the originals in the Library of Congress and Stanford University. The reduction, and the glossy photographic paper on which the book is printed, does make some of the smaller map text hard to read, so it’s worth having a magnifying glass to hand, especially in the mass of alleys in the City, and, because these are reproductions of near 300 year old maps, the lack of contrast can occasionally be challenging, but this is a wonderful object to own.
Because as well as the maps we get a detailed introduction that traces the history of their production, the story of the life of Rocque and – importantly – the engravers of the two works, as well as reproductions of the subscriber lists, copious notes for further reading and two appendices. The first of these is a detailed catalogue of the individual sheets in the publications, and the second an A-Z index of 6,000 places recorded across the two maps (there are 21 ‘Kings Street’ and 15 ‘Queen Street’ for example) including 250 places of worship and 64 estates, so one can navigate one’s way around the early Georgian city.
The A-Z of Georgian London and Its Environs – John Rocque’s Maps, 1746-1747 is published by the London Topographical Society and copies can be bought here.
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