Pimlico and Belgravia from an important large-scale survey of London

HORWOOD, Richard.

[Untitled plan of Pimlico and Belgravia.]
London: 1795. Original colour. 570 x 520mm.

Marginal tears repaired.

A sheet from a plan Howgego describes as the 'largest and most important London map of the eighteenth century', on a scale of 26 inches to a mile. It shows the property of the Chelsea Water Works, which used a tidal creek to extract water from the Thames and pump it, untreated, to reservoirs supplying places as far north as Grosvenor Square. Banned from using tidal Thames water by Act of Parliament in 1852, the company moved out, and the basin was used to build railway tracks to Victoria Station. Along the west of the waterworks is Upper Belgrave Place, renamed Buckingham Palace Road in 1912, with the fields that were developed as Belgravia. An unnamed bridge over the waterworks is Chelsea Bridge, now Ebury Bridge, over the railway lines.
Further east Pimlico is filled with ornamental gardens, with the patterns engraved onto the map.

Horwood's intention was to mark each house's number (a practice started in 1735), but this was abandoned as impractical. He started his scheme in 1790, expecting to be finished by 1792: by 1794 he was apologising to his subscribers (including George III); in 1798 he received a loan of £500 from the Phoenix Fire-Office, for whom Horwood worked as a surveyor, to finish the map. However this assistance was not enough to stop Horwood dying in poverty in 1803.

HOWGEGO: 200, and pp.21-22.
Stock ID : 20825