Hello, I'm Brian Tiplady. Since I retired from my career as a clinical scientist, I have been indulging other interests such as sailing, and exploring and contributing to the wonderful variety of material on the internet
Old maps are fun
When I'm travelling I often take an old map or guide-book, so I can see what was there 100 or 200 years ago. For example:
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| Kings Cross, London, in 1827. Source Wikimedia Commons | Kings Cross today. Source Open Street Maps |
As you'd expect, there was no railway coming into Kings Cross or St Pancras in 1827. Some of the roads are still recognisable, but completely gone is the smallpox hospital, which was roughly where the atrium of Kings Cross Station is now.
The 1827 map of London is by Christopher and John Greenwood. This map, like many other old maps is available on Wikimedia Commons. Most web users know Wikipedia, but its partner site, Commons, is less well known. It is a repository of over a hundred million media files, uploaded by volunteers - anyone can contribute. Many files are in the public domain, such as the 1827 London map. Others are released under licenses such as Creative Commons. Everything on Commons is free to re-use, provided appropriate acknowledgement is given. It is a truly amazing resource, which I have both used and contributed to extensively. Many of the maps on Commons are georeferenced, which means that with a bit of tweaking you can get them onto your phone or tablet and use them with GPS.
Another great resource to which anyone can contribute is the Internet Archive. This is more geared towards books, though all sorts of files are supported. The Ordnance Survey published a series of historical and archaeological maps of Great Britain in the fifties and sixties. These are fascinating, still very useful, and I have uoloaded most of these to the Archive, for example the map of Roman Britain from, 1956. This much more than just a map, it has a detailed introduction, a chronological table, a list of names, a set of detailed maps,and a topographical index, as well as the main map at a scale of 1:1,000,000.
One of the maps in Roman Britain is of Britain and Ireland according to Ptolemy, who lived and worked in Alexandria in the 2nd Century C.A.. As with all ptolemaic maps, it is a reconstruction based on the tables of latitude and longitude given in the Geography. (The earliest surviving map dates from the late 13th-Century.)Ptolemy here
Ordnance Survey publications are subject to Crown Copyright, which expires after 50 years , so anything published before 1974 is in the public domain. This makes sharing very straightforward, and many OS maps, including the classic one-inch series, are freely available. link to Commons for OS one-inch