Old Series
Created from four Ordnance Survey Old Series maps first published between 1805 and 1822

This map shows London as a metropolis of around 1.1 million people: tiny by today’s standards, but large enough to make it the world’s second most populous city after Peking. Apart from a built-up area from Lambeth to Rotherhithe, the city is all north of the river and hardly extends as far as today’s Circle line. Although ribbon development was starting to take place along the main routes leading out of London, places such as Wandsworth, Acton, Hampstead, West Ham and Streatham were quite distinct settlements, while numerous other parts of the present-day metropolis like Morden, Ealing, Finchley, Ilford and Sydenham were little more than villages, surrounded by fields and open countryside. Greenwich, Kingston, Richmond and Croydon were already sizeable towns on London’s outskirts.

The map describes a city that was already large but on the threshold of still greater expansion. Many of the mills, farms, parks, hamlets and houses that the map reveals were soon to swept away for good, although some survive as place names. Many of these had remained unchanged for centuries. Ordnance Survey’s early 19th-century surveyors captured numerous aspects of the human landscape just as they were about to be engulfed by the ever-encroaching metropolis.

This was the era of the horse-drawn cart, of the canal and the coaching inn, but also of slums, social inequality and untreated sewage. This map shows the London that had many ways had remained unaltered for generations but which was about to undergo a period of major expansion, development and social change. In 1821, the year before the last of the Old Series sheets used to create this map was published, the young Charles Dickens and his family moved from Kent to Camden Town. The London this map describes is thus the London of Dickens’ youth, the formative years of arguably the city’s greatest chronicler. The changes that London would undergo in Dickens’ lifetime would transform both the city and the surrounding countryside: before long, these changes would be felt all over the world.