The British Library has recently launched Picturing Places, a new resource exploring its rich topographical holdings. Many of the images used on this site – including the Plan itself – were kindly provided by the library, so I was very glad to be able to give something back by contributing an article on ‘Accumulating London’ to the project. This article explores the interactions between a series of different publications from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that sought to claim particular niches through depicting the city. Some of these works are covered by Romantic London already, but a couple will form part of a major update to the site that I’ll be launching in stages over the next month or so.
The first part of this update is something that I’ve wanted to make a part of the site for a very long time – the revised fourth edition of Horwood’s Plan published by William Faden in 1819. I’ve now added this as a new tiled map layer for all the existing content, allowing visitors to explore the changes in the city over the course of the early nineteenth century by contrasting Horwood’s original with Faden’s final revision. I’ll be adding a fuller discussion of the additions that Faden and his cartographers made to the Plan at a later date, but if you’re keen to trace the development of the docks and the East End, examine the creation of Regent Street or look at what Regent’s Park might have looked like if the original designs had been followed more closely, a page for exploring the 1819 version can be seen here.
