The 1882 1:2500 map may well be the most beautiful map ever made (IMHO). We are fortunate to have two sheets of that issue, and the same two sheets of its less spectacular child, the 1901 issue, lent by Anna Blomfield. Thank You, Anna. These maps are out of copyright and reproduced here through a laborious process of multiple photos and stitching together, to retain the original resolution. Each map here is stitched together from 9 separate 16-megapixel images. If anyone would care to sponsor me (EJW) to the tune of about £15K for a high resolution document camera, feel free to leave a message below.
Each of the jpegs here is about a 13Mbyte file. Click for a much bigger version.
Sorry about the lighter patch in the bottom middle. Believe me, if I could fix it, I would. Anyone who is handy with photoshop, leave a message and I’ll send you the psd file to have a go 🙂 but, be warned, there are 45 photoshop layers in there and the psd file is over 1.5 GBytes.
If that image is too big to handle, here is a reduced-resolution version. It’s about 2Mbytes.
Here’s a screen grab showing details of the reduced and full-sized version side by side, to illustrate why it’s worth spending hours patching together the big images.
Comments? Offers to buy me a £15k document camera?