Gibson Library  

The Ordnance Survey Old Series One Inch maps held at the Library are listed below. Each one only bears the date of its original publication, but in most cases it is a later "State" - without updating its date. The State numbers shown below are taken from The First Ordnance Survey Map (2015) by Richard Hellyer and Richard Oliver, published by The Charles Close Society, which describes the Old Series sheets 1 to 90, and lists all their known states in great detail.

Although the maps were being updated, There were often long gaps between survey completeion, engraving and publication, so that a map dated, say, 1831, will not have all the features that existed on the ground at that date. Updates were also very slow, but in general they were faster when it came to adding new railways. All the Essex sheets below (1, 2, 47 & 48) were published in 1831 (despite describing themselves as 1805) long before there were railways anywhere in Essex.

The earlier OS maps were published in County sets - following the tradition of the preceding 200 years of British county maps - as well as individual sheets. From the early 1830s the maps started to be issued initially as four Quarter sheets (known by the map number suffixed by NW, NE, SE and SW); the maps that were originally issued as full sheets were also later in their lives issued as 4 quarter sheets. Initially the OS seemed to update all 4 Quarter sheets of a map together, but progressively the individual quarters were updated separately. The Notes column below

contains either "Full" for a sheet issued full size, or "4Qtrs" for a sheet issued as 4 quarter sheets.

All the maps held at the library are dissected and backed on cloth; where a map is issued as 4 quarter sheets all four are together on a single folded cloth - which if separate Quarter sheets had been updated at different dates could result in items leaving one part of the map and failing to arrive on the neighbouring part (eg sheet 52 below), and often the darkness of printing varying drastically between the four quarters of what is presented as a single large sheet.

The process of combining four quarter sheets into one large sheet, and then adding a fabric band around the edge to stregthen the map, has resulted in most of the marginal details being lost (trimmed away or hidden), so that some of the information that could be used to date a particular copy is now missing. This makes the dating of the maps more difficult (as they did not add the actual date of a map being re-issued afetr an update, and hence the dates shown in the "Actual" column are approximate.

Unless stated otherwise (ie only sheet 10), the sheet titles named below do not actually appear on the face of the map. The maps were of course all printed in monochrome; on the earlier ones the major roads were hand coloured - and these look far more attractive and easier to read. Generally, though, these early ones have simply less detail on them, so being less crowded they are intrinsically easier to read anyway.