The 24 London, England, Stanfords London Maps, 1890, Ancestry has made available are informative and colourful; they were originally six inches to the mile.
Good luck finding a place of interest. The individual maps are shown on a film strip. It’s as if the collection was dumped online. There is no index, no indication of the order, and not even a linked overview map. Ancestry can do much better.
With a bit of playing around with software (the no-longer available Microsoft Image Composite Editor) I use to stitch together microfilm images I was able to figure out that the full map is laid out in a grid of 4 images across and 6 imagse down. The first row is composed of images 1, 2, 3, 4 (which inexplicably are saved as 00000, 00001, 00002, 00003, etc), the second row are images 5, 6, 7, 8, and so on.
My stitching together of the images isn’t perfect for I noticed in a few areas where features that cross the various map images aren’t quite aligned. But it is “good enough” for me since I used free software.
The resulting combined image is about 400 MB in size with a width of 30150 pixels and a height of 30150 pixels. It’s so big that Irfanview, the free image viewer I use, refuses to open it. I was able to scale it down to 50% of the original and was finally able to open the resulting file and it is still readable.
You’d think that kind of compositing wouldn’t be beyond Ancestry!
I had much the same reaction as you…It really is like they just dumped a bunch of files into a directory. That said, I did manage to find a couple of key areas I need, but being able to see the whole map to know if the location I’m looking for is even included (can’t find Bethnal Green – seems as though it was too far north) would have been helpful. Even citing it is difficult as there’s really no information to use.
I just checked the collection description again and it bears no resemblance to the images we see…
Teresa: you will find neighbourhood of Bethnal Green on the bottom right of image 7 and possibly upper right of image 11. To locate it on the map I made use of a modern map to first find the area and then the composite map I created out of all the images to see if this map from 1890 included the area.
I agree that what Ancestry has provided is minimal and it is not their usual type of collection. However, I’ll take anything that I can get even if it means expending time and effort on my part to make it useful. I’m really hoping that this is a work in progress.
Although I’d more likely use the Maps collection from the National Library of Scotland for London (https://maps.nls.uk/towns/london.html) to find the maps from the time I’m interested in. “A map of the County of London shewing the boundary of the jurisdiction of the London County Council, etc. ” by E. Stanford from 1892 is more useful since Bethnal Green is colour coded to help us identify the boundary. The 1888 map even has Bethnal Green separated into South West and North East.
Hi Ken,
Thanks for the tip re finding BG in the Ancestry collection. I will definitely have a boo.
I use the NLS maps and London Picture Archive maps frequently (among others)… I can lose myself for an entire day in digital map collections and at this point likely know 19th century London better than I know most modern cities I’ve lived in 😊