Early map of the road from Hereford to Leicester

OGILBY, John.

The Road from Hereford to Leicester
London, c.1675, second state. Coloured. 330 x 445mm.

Slight restoration to centre fold in title.

The complete route from Hereford to Leicester, via Worcester, Bromsgrove and Coventry.
Plate 72 from Ogilby's 'Britannia', the first national road-atlas of any country in Western Europe. It was composed of maps of seventy-three major roads and cross-roads, presented as trompe-l'oeil scrolls, each with a decorative title cartouche. It was the first English atlas on a uniform scale, at one inch to a mile, and the 'mile' Ogilby used became the national standard, the statute mile of 1,760 yards. Ogilby claimed that 26,600 miles of roads were surveyed in the course of preparing the atlas, on foot pushing a surveyor's wheel, but only about 7,500 were actually depicted in print. It was only after the 'Britannia' that roads started being shown on county maps.


Stock ID : 16364