Annotated Plans

One thing I’m hoping to work on further as the site develops is finding ways of comparing different schema for organising the city.  In token of this, I’ve put together a version of Horwood’s Plan which juxtaposes the markers from Fores’s New Guide for Foreigners, Modern London and the Microcosm.  I’ve not currently linked this in the toolbar, as the number of markers means that it’s a bit slow to load, but putting the three different guides together reveals some suggestive hotspots which their representations of the city have in common as well as showing some more scattered markers which indicate where they differ from each other in their priorities.  I’ll be talking about this, among other things, at the Community and its Limits conference in Leeds this weekend.

I’ve just published the project’s first annotated version of Horwood’s Plan; this uses the text from Fores’s New Guide for Foreigners, a dual-language French and English tourist guide to London published by the stationer and print seller S.W. Fores in around 1789.  The annotated plan can be viewed here; I’ve also written up an introduction which includes contextual information and excerpts some interesting statistics from Fores’s guide’s own introduction.