A Cartographic Analysis of Soviet Military City Plans

Abstract

—including the facsimile A to Z series produced in partnership with Harry Margary—such as the so-called Agas map, 1560, and John Rocque’s 1746 map. The present volume maintains the usual high production standards and encompasses a wide range of excellent articles, all carefully illustrated. The only one to address directly a single map or mapmaker is Malcolm Jones’s reappraisal of William Hole’s map of the Finsbury Fields’ archery marks now in the Bodleian Library. Jones shows that this hand-coloured printed map was likely to have been appended to the c.1594 guide book, the Ayme for Finsburie Archers, ‘with distances and scores and yards for every mark’. These timber or stone target posts were decorated to show sponsoring guild companies or alehouses or to commemorate local folk heroes like Long Meg, ‘the roaring girl’, whose ‘jest biography appeared in 1590’, and Martin’s Monkey, dedicated to Sir William Martyn, Lord Mayor of London in 1493, who kept a monkey. Crucially, Jones provides a close analysis of the names of all these marks and their histories, allowing a reappraisal of the not always accurate engraved copy in the London Metropolitan Archives. Historical maps and plans in one form or another appear in nearly all the articles in this volume. Elizabeth Hallam Smith’s piece on Westminster Palace deals with Robert Hulton and William Roades’s A Pocket Map of the Cities of London & Westminster (1743), with its record of all the landing-places on the Thames. Vanessa Harding’s essay on Browne’s Place on the waterfront east of Billingsgate makes great use of reconstructed maps in the British Historic Towns Atlas The City of London from Prehistoric Times to c. 1520. These and the Jones piece are a small sample from a group of important articles that will fascinate and inform the map historian as well as any student of London’s topographical history.