Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
which also includes analysis of farm census data, would have been im-
possible without the support of DEFR A and its agencies; but it would also
have been impossible without the goodwill of numerous map librarians,
of the LUSGB copyright holder, and of the Frederick Soddy Trust, all
gained through our commitment to creating a public resource.
Property Services
“Old maps” are of course essential to defining property boundaries and
to understanding the past history of properties, and academic historical
geographers have sometimes acted as consultants in legal disputes.
25
However, individual disputes are unlikely to justify construction of a
GIS, and the two examples discussed here use specialized HGIS to drive
websites that serve mass markets - not lawyers involved in disputes, but
lawyers handling routine property transactions. Anyone purchasing a
property, whether a large industrial site or an ordinary house, needs
information on associated liabilities. Some information needs will be
obvious, such as council or property taxes. Others will relate to the site's
past history and be far less obvious.
First, the Landmark Information Group is a commercial partner
of the Ordnance Survey and has created what is essentially a very large
GIS built primarily from nearly a million historical maps at six inches to
one mile (1:10,560) and more detailed scales for Britain between ca. 1848
and ca. 1995.
26
By contrast, the largest noncommercial historical maps
database is that constructed by the US Geological Survey's Historical
Quadrangle Scanning Project, covering approximately 200,000 maps.
27
Landmark 's database forms the basis for a number of distinct products
sold online. These include the old-maps.co.uk website, which straightfor-
wardly sells reproductions of historic maps to the general public. How-
ever, this is a sideline compared to Envirocheck:
The Envirocheck Historical Data Report identifies historical land use, such as:
potentially contaminative industrial uses; potentially infilled land; historical
tanks and energy facilities; data captured from Landmark 's unique set of
historical building plans such as potentially contaminative features from
historical building plans, which includes asbestos and areas cleared due to
enemy action (bomb damage); list of the historical building plans analyzed for
