A map of London as it was during the era of the Tudor monarchs | Hacker News Reader

A map of London as it was during the era of the Tudor monarchs

ianvisits.co.uk

68 pointsfanf222 comments

Nice. For a few years I had a desk in the middle of St Mary Graces Abbey cemetery. I believe the black death and great plague filled it. There were tunnels under my desk leading to The Tower, but they'd been blocked up years before I could take advantage.

Edit: I've just found that I currently work in another, smaller cemetery.

That's amusing. Excavating future beings will think we wanted our ancestors near us so we built our cities ontop of their graves.

What's funny is that the map only covers London, as in the City of London, not the City of Westminster, which is where the Tudor monarchs themselves would have been!

It’s just using Tudors as the historical era - it’s not really about the literal Tudor monarchs.

It does include the Tower of London though.

I work in Moorgate, and although I know so many names are derived from the things that were at the location, I'd never put two and two together that Moorgate is the gate to Moor field, which was I assume, a moor.

Especially when there's Moorfields Eye Hospital near by!

Did you know Spitalfields comes from Hospital fields? There used to be a hospital near the market. Every name has a story especially in London.

The final link in the article was the most interesting part for me. The National Library of Scotland had a side-by-side comparison of modern maps (Bing Maps by default) with set of Ordnance Survey maps from 1892-1914. It's incredible how accurate the maps are and how they line up: https://maps.nls.uk/geo/explore/side-by-side/#zoom=15&lat=55...

Most of the maps are from the Ordnance Survey - which really does do superb maps.

Mind you I hadn't realised that the original purpose of the OS was to provide military maps of Scotland following the '45 rebellion - maybe that explains why the Highlands are mapped so carefully ;-)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordnance_Survey

https://pastmap.org.uk/ has the same maps in a (to my mind) better interface.

Thanks, I'm checking it now! Also hey Andrew, long time no see (edit: I realised I have no details on HN - it's Sean, we worked together in ADI) :D

Is it building on this: http://www.historictownsatlas.org.uk/content/tudor-london-15...

It's a great book to have in paper form!

My Aunt worked on that map after retiring from being a cartographer for the Oxford University Press and their world Atlases. It was fascinating to see the work that went in to collecting data, drawing and redrawing maps. Things like papers from a court case being discovered lead to observations such as "if such and such happened then the width of street X at this point must have been 2 feet wider" or similar. A painstaking work of love by the whole team, driven by tremendous academic rigour. Fascinating.

It's a bit awkward to use (I was expecting a direct link) but for anyone else wondering:

1. Enable the Tudor layer using the Layers menu in the left-hand sidebar

2. Apparently, only the City of London (not Greater London) is covered, so make sure to pan/zoom over there!

Generally, a nice little tool — it's a shame the satellite imagery is so low-res.

It entertains me how small and precisely (presumably pettily) staked out the parishes were. There must be a good story why All-Hallows-the-Less, upstream from London Bridge, was specifically allocated that green space disconnected from the parish itself, seemingly cloven off of All-Hallows-the-Great's parish.

Not sure about London specifically, but this sort of fragmentation occured in medieval Europe through people donating their property to a specific church, even though there would have been a geographically closer one.

My gf loves this kind of work and actually wants to do something very similar herself. She has been working on mapping the locations of Emma Smith during her life in the 1800s. It would be super neat if something like this existed for the united states during that time.

so the map doesn't appear to contain any royal residences, which were perhaps all in Westminster not London at the time? So Henry VIII and QE1 etc didn't live within the walls of London?

The Tower of London is technically a palace, but yeah, Royals generally didn't live inside the square mile. The Palace of Whitehall in Westminster would have been the main London area residence at the time of these maps.

Note that the Tower of London is actually outside the walls of the city of London, so even it doesn't qualify as living inside the city of London.

Henry and Elizabeth lived at Greenwich

Interesting how little the names of places have changed in 4-500 years - Bishopsgate, East Cheap, Cannon Street, Wallbrook etc. All recognisable.

Fascinating to discover I am currently sitting where there used to be a Franciscan monastery!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com