Historic Maps of London

layersoflondon.org

34 points·pizzicato··5 comments

Also similar for New York and NYC: https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/collections/maps-of-new-...

and a fun way to navigate some of them: https://maap.columbia.edu/place/then.html That was a project I worked on in ~2006 when Google Maps was more 'new'. At the time I was very proud because Google Maps still had a 'jumpy' zoom interface and I wanted it to feel immersive to 'enter' the maps by 'falling' into them.

Later that year, Google Maps added the same feature, which I don't attribute at all to this project, but it was cool to do it before them.

A similar thing for the former Habsburg Empire and then for Austro-Hungary can be found at this link [1], zooming in/out, panning and clicking on the different red circles should give one a general idea of the available old maps.

[1] https://maps.hungaricana.hu/en/map/?layers=google-hybrid%2Cv...

I've spent hours on here before observing the changes around my flat. Crazy how much stays the same as the 20's/30's

As christmas presents, i got paper maps of the area where i live from the late 19th century to the early 20th century. Over that period, it went from farmland with a few roads through it to a dense suburb. There are some fascinating details, like a tile kiln which presumably supplied a lot of the neighbourhood (there are very distinctive tiles in some estates), and patterns of old land use still present in the shape of the streets today.

That's a great idea as a present. How little the street patterns change over the years is fascinating.

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