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.
A visitor named Andrew left a comment on another page which I failed to notice for 9 months. Sorry, Andrew 🙁🤦! He drew my attention to the splendid work of the National Library of Scotland, which has published digitised maps from this series.
Here is the north of Eversholt as a 6 MByte JPEG. (I can’t see any differennce between this and the 13 MByte JPEGs above.) This map below is from https://maps.nls.uk/view/114482991 and is published under a CC-BY-NC-SA licence – no commercial use. However, you can copy, print, republish this map, as long as there is no commercial use. See their website for details.
Comments? Offers to buy me a £15k document camera?