Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
CHAPTER TWO
MAPPING THE METROPOLIS
For thousands of years, people have striven to adapt and transform the natural world to create
environments where they can thrive and live comfortably. Of all the habitats that humanity has
devised, perhaps the most extreme - and the most profoundly human - is that of the city. Ar-
chaeologists have discovered that urban living dates back to at least 4,000 BC in some parts
of the world. Over the past few centuries, it has become steadily more popular. City-dwellers
now make up about half of the world's population, and this proportion continues to increase.
Cartographers have of ten found the city a difficult place to map. It is in the nature of urban
environments that land-use is both dense and diverse, with buildings of different ages and pur-
poses frequently sited in close proximity. Rapid changes are the norm in many cities, espe-
cially those with growing populations to accommodate. In others, buildings and localities of
special historical or cultural interest are zealously protected from alteration. In fact, the world's
urban areas are so diverse that few generalisations about them can be wholly accurate. They
vary enormously in age, in size, and in political and economic importance. Their terrain may
be flat or hilly, their thoroughfares broad and straight or narrow and twisting, and their devel-
opment laissez-faire or tightly controlled.
The maps of cities held among the records at The National Archives are no less diverse than
the urban landscapes that they portray. Since the last years of the 16th century, the British gov-
ernment has made significant use of both printed and manuscript mapping of urban centres.
Indeed, many of the oldest and most beautiful of our printed maps are town or city plans. By
the 19th and 20th centuries, maps in the government's custody feature cities from almost every
part of the globe, as well as towns throughout the British Isles.
Inevitably, the city most frequently represented on maps in the archives is London, the capit-
al of the United Kingdom and the former hub of the British Empire. As the core of this chapter,
we have therefore selected three maps capturing this great metropolis at moments roughly 140
years apart. Each was made at a time when maps were needed to record changes in the urban
landscape. Restoration London of the 1660s (see
Old Father Thames
)
and Georgian London -
depicted at the time of the Napoleonic Wars (
Town and country
)
- were both encroaching in-
exorably on the surrounding countryside. By contrast, London in the autumn of 1940 (
Bombed
out
) was struggling valiantly for survival against the chaos of the Blitz. Excluded from this
chapter due to lack of space are maps of London during the Victorian and Edwardian eras,
