19xx Six Inch Maps

These maps were lent by Anna Blomfield. Thank You, Anna. They are out of copyright. They don’t show much of Eversholt and are not marked up with anything interesting but might prove handy. Each map has been pasted together from four smaller images to improve the resolution – sorry if they don’t join up somewhere. Click for bigger (6Mbyte jpeg) versions. They are quite faded and dirty, the colour is quite a good match for the paper.

This last one is from the 1950s Charity Map page. The latest date marked on the printed map is 1938. It’s marked up with the proposed M1 route and the charity lands, but is from the same series as the maps above, so may as well be included here. Sorry, the colour’s not right on this one.

Emrys Williams bought this 1902 map on Ebay for £5. It’s not in great condition, and the photo isn’t great either, but it’s usable and out of copyright.

This map was found and bought on Ebay by Robert Berkeley. It’s from 1938 so copyright expired in 1988 and it’s published here in the public domain. Click the map for a much bigger version.

Just as an experiment, to try out Adobe Photoshop CS6, I (EJW) reshot the above image in camera raw mode with my Nikon D7000. I used Photoshop’s camera raw plugin to remove about 1 pixel of chromatic aberration. I used Free Transform to fix the geometry and make the map as close to a rectangle as I could without getting too fancy. I then doubled the pixel count in each direction and played with the sharpening and noise reduction until it looked nice. I used the curves feature to remove a slight colour cast which might be present on the old paper map. I used the content-aware patch tool to fill in the hole in the top right of the image where the corner of the paper map has been cut off. That produced the version below. Be aware that if you click the link to get the full scale picture, it’s 8.5 Mbytes! But it looks pretty cool to me, both the camera and Photoshop CS6 work rather well. Now if only I could afford that 35-megapixel D800… Must buy lottery ticket…