High quality antique maps of London & British Isles

September 14, 2009 4:05 AM

MAPCO's aim is to provide genealogists, students and historians with free access to high quality scans of rare and beautiful antique maps and views. The site displays a variety of highly collectable 18th and 19th century maps and plans of London and the British Isles...

See also Old London Maps for more maps and articles about old London and its sights. (in part via warrenellis.com)

posted by slimepuppy (16 comments total)

This is brilliant. Thank you.
posted by Helga-woo at 4:16 AM on September 14, 2009

Fantastic. I love on the older county maps how you'd get individual country seats marked with the name of the resident Gent. or Esq^r.
posted by Abiezer at 4:48 AM on September 14, 2009

Wow. This makes me drool more than any porn. Thanks for the link.
posted by rokusan at 5:29 AM on September 14, 2009

Awesome! I am thinking about getting an antique map tattoo and this will be invaluable.
posted by WidgetAlley at 5:31 AM on September 14, 2009

-chews hands off in excitement-

THIS is too awesome.
posted by strixus at 5:32 AM on September 14, 2009

I am thinking about getting an antique map tattoo...

"Here there be dragons?"
posted by rokusan at 5:42 AM on September 14, 2009

This is fantastic - great detail on the London map.
posted by WPW at 5:48 AM on September 14, 2009

There goes my morning productivity.
posted by JeffK at 6:38 AM on September 14, 2009

Great stuff—thanks!
posted by languagehat at 7:26 AM on September 14, 2009

I very ultra-secretly have an intense fetish for old maps. I used to haunt the map rooms at the NY library. I loiter outside my town historical society, but have never had the guts to go in and start asking for old maps. I google for old maps relentlessly, but never found this site.

It's kind of sick though, I read a lot of Jane Austen and historical trashy romances, and am so obsessed that I frequently want to cross reference the characters movements with maps from the time. Hopefully, I will now be one step closer to doing so.

slimepuppy, you are a god among mefites.
posted by bunnycup at 8:03 AM on September 14, 2009

> I used to haunt the map rooms at the NY library. ... It's kind of sick though, I read a lot ... and am so obsessed that I frequently want to cross reference the characters movements with maps from the time.

Soulmate! We probably ran into each other in Room 117. The main librarian there, a very nice thin lady who looked rather as if she'd stepped out of an Austen novel, used to smile when she saw me come in, wondering whether I'd be looking for a map of twentieth-century Aleppo, nineteenth-century London, or eighteenth-century Paris (I've got Xeroxes of all those in my map drawer). I haunted the Map Division for over twenty years, and I miss it.
posted by languagehat at 9:26 AM on September 14, 2009

UT's PCL Map Collection also has a large collection of historical maps for all around the world.
posted by kmz at 10:06 AM on September 14, 2009

Glad to see people enjoying these. I was quite surprised that these links had not been posted to metafilter before. That PCL Map Colletion posted by kmz is worthy of a FPP of its own.
posted by slimepuppy at 10:12 AM on September 14, 2009

Oh hells yes. Flagged as "fantastic" because "an exceedingly welcome tonic for all the depressing newsfilter fight-threads I've been reading" does not yet exist as a flagging explanation.

Thank you for sharing this. Damn you for deep-sixing the better part of today's productivity.
posted by EatTheWeak at 12:17 PM on September 14, 2009

Great post. Is there a single internet index that tries to organize and link to all of the great historic map sites out there?
posted by LarryC at 1:21 PM on September 14, 2009

Great post, thank you! My only regret is that the maps fill me with wanderlust for a bygone world.
posted by Horatius at 10:01 PM on September 15, 2009