Maps of Old London

Before London became the gray sprawl of today, it was a medieval city of spires and monasteries, of city walls still standing and the Thames still clean enough to drink from. This collection gathers the most significant maps of old London from the Tudor age through the Georgian era, each one a portal into a city that has almost entirely vanished. We see London through the eyes of Ralph Agas, whose isometric views seem to hover above the rooftops; through John Rocque's meticulous eighteenth-century surveys; through Anthony Van den Wyngaerde's sweeping panoramas drawn from church steeples and towers. The annotations tell us what we're looking at: which buildings survive, which have been renamed, which were erased by fire or war or simple neglect. Here is the London that Shakespeare's audience knew, the streets that burned in 1666, the neighborhoods that rose from the ashes. For anyone who loves London, these maps offer something precious: the chance to walk its vanished streets, to trace the exact path of walls that now exist only in memory. This is cartography as time travel, and it is infinitely more than a reference work - it is a love letter to a city that has never stopped reinventing itself.