Twenty three datasets from the British Antarctic Survey are now available to readers in the digital maps viewer which can be accessed in the maps reading room.

High resolution vector polygons of Antarctic rock outcrop in the Digital Maps Viewer. Data from the SCAR Antarctic Digital Database, accessed 2022

 

British Antarctic Survey delivers and enables world-leading interdisciplinary research in the Polar Regions. They work to advance our understanding of Earth as a sustainable planet and facilitate access for the science community to the UK polar research operation. They are holders of a range of Polar data from long-term environmental, biological, geological and meteorological datasets, to specimens, maps, and photographs. We have received a deposit of The Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research Antarctic Digital Database which is published by the British Antarctic Survey. This database provides seamless topographic datasets and covers Antarctica south of 60°S with the following datasets:

• coastline, including grounding lines and ice shelf fronts
• rock outcrop
• contours
• lakes
• moraine
• streams
• seamask
• ADD data limit at 60°S

Thanks to Laura Gerrish and Felix Fennell at British Antarctic Survey for their help in obtaining the data. The data were made available using the Antarctic Stereographic Projection (EPSG 3031) which is the first time we have employed this projection. As a background layer we chose to use a Landsat Image Mosaic Of Antarctica and added some key place names to provide context.

The data can be viewed in the digital maps viewer which is available onsite at the British Library St Pancras in the maps reading room. Please do come into the reading room and take a look but do also read the instructions here beforehand that can help you access the maps reading room. The viewer allows readers to browse maps and geospatial data that the legal deposit libraries have collected for over twenty years using a slippy maps interface similar to Google, Bing or Apple maps. Ordnance Survey Great Britain Master Map and Ordnance Survey Northern Ireland Large Scale mapping are added every year and the 2022 versions are now accessible to readers in the viewer alongside older versions.

Dr Gethin Rees

In early 2023 we received the sad news that Maurice Nicholson had passed away. Maurice was a retired pharmacist who had been instrumental to the success of the Georeferencer project since its inception in 2012. He contributed points to every collection, from the Ordnance Survey Drawings to King’s Topographical collection. For many consecutive years he was one of the georeferencers who contributed the most points, he attended the BL Labs symposium regularly and was a stalwart of Georeferencer events organised by Phil Hatfield and Kimberly Kowal. In short, his contribution to the project has been immense and we are very grateful to him. You can read more about Maurice and his contribution to the Georeferencer in this blog post .

As well as his georeferencing, Maurice was a keen local historian with an expert knowledge of the Queen’s Park area in Bedford. He organised and participated in several events on this subject and a recording of a talk he gave can be found here .

He also published a chapter in ‘Queen’s Park Lives’ on this subject which is available on his academia.edu page .

Maurice will be missed by all who knew him at the British Library and we would like to extend our condolences to his family.

Maurice Nicholson

 

by Dr Gethin Rees

Two bound sets of maps from the British Library’s core collection of early modern English cartography have recently been digitised and placed online. Harley MS 3749 is a series of 18 hand-drawn maps of parts of the Royal estate at Windsor, produced in 1607 by the English surveyor, mapmaker and author John Norden (c. 1547-1625).

John Norden, 'A DESCRIPTION OF THE HONOR OF WINDESOR..' Windsor or London, 1607. Harley MS 3749, f. 1r.

Harley MS 3813 is a collection of 37 (of an original 44) small printed maps of English and Welsh counties and areas of Ireland and Scotland, engraved by the Flemish artist Pieter Van den Keere (1571-c. 1646) and printed at around the same time as Norden’s work. Their histories are entwined in various ways.

Pieter Van den Keere,'Scotiae pars que incolis Stratna hern vocatur cum circumsinys' in [A collection of engraved maps of the British Isles], Amsterdam, c. 1605. Harley MS 3813, f. 178v.

Both sets of maps ended up in the collection of Robert (1661-1724) and Edward (1689-1741) Harley, the 1^st and 2^nd Earls of Oxford, thousands of manuscripts, printed books and associated materials which became one of the founding collections of the British Museum in 1753. Norden’s work, produced for and originally owned by James VI and I, came into the Harleys’ possession in 1710, whilst Van der Keere’s maps reached the collection in 1725.

In addition to their shared provenance, it is interesting to note that the two mapmakers knew and worked with each other. As well as his surveying work and devotional writing, Norden conceived of  a grand multi-volume county-by-county geography or ‘chorography’ of Britain, having recognised, like others, the public appetite for maps and geographical writings following the success of Christopher Saxton’s atlas of 1579. Norden’s Speculum Britannia was not completed, but he started work on a number of counties, and even published some of them. The first published county, in 1593, was Middlesex, containing maps including ones of London and Westminster engraved by one Pieter Van den Keere.

John Norden, 'London', from Speculum Britannia: Middlesex. London, 1593. Maps Crace Port 1. 21.

Van den Keere would become one of the most important engravers of the 17^th century. He had moved to London in 1584, and was apprenticed to the London-based Dutch engraver Jodocus Hondius (1563-1612). He left London for Amsterdam in 1593.

Pieter Van den Keere, 'Northamtoniae Bedfordiae Cantabrigae Huntingdonae et Rutlandiae com'. Amsterdam, c. 1605. Harley MS 3813, f. 45v.

Northamton, Bedfordiæ, Cantabrigiæ, Huntingdoniæ et Rutlandiæ comitatuum vicinarumq. regionum partium adiacent nova veraq. descriptio a.o. d. 1576 / Christophorus Saxton descripsit. London, 1579. Maps C.3.bb.5.

Harley MS 3813 is one of several ‘proof’ sets of small county maps copied from Saxton’s and others’ maps of parts of Britain. It is commonly thought of as the blueprint for a mooted atlas of Britain along similar lines of Norden’s Speculum. Writing in 1972, Helen Wallis believed that it might have been Van Den Keere’s collaboration with Norden that inspired him. The Harley example has been finely hand-coloured and contains hand-written descriptions on the topography and gentry of each county (another set in the Royal Geographical Society has the same handwritten text), suggesting the role of a mock-up of what such a publication might look like.

Pieter Van den Keere, [handwritten notes concerning the counties of Northamptonshire, Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Huntingdon and Rutland]. Amsterdam[?] , c. 1605. Harley MS 3813, f. 46r.

The date of 1599 appears on three maps and it is sensible to assume that Van den Keere engraved them all around this time. But he didn't print them until 1605 or later, observed R.A. Skelton in 1970, due to the evidence of the paper used. The maps were not officially published until 1617 in an illustrated abridgment of Camden’s Britannia by the Amsterdam publisher Blaeu.

John Speed, 'Midlesex described with the most famous cities of London and Westminster' from The theatre of the empire of Great Britaine. London, 1611-12. Maps C.7.c.20.

For whatever reason, neither Van den Keere’s or Norden’s projects properly got off the ground. The work which eventually sated the English appetite for maps was John Speed’s Theatre of the empire of Great Britaine of 1611-12, which incidentally included county maps engraved by Van den Keere's former teacher Jodocus Hondius. Speed’s Middlesex map (above) even incorporated copies of the Van den Keere-engraved London and Westminster maps that had appeared in Norden’s Speculum... Middlesex of two decades earlier.

John Norden, [A map of Windsor Castle] in A description of the honor of Windesor.... 1607. Harley MS 3749, fs.001r.

Norden’s little atlas of Windsor royal parks (Harley MS 3749) was the sort of project Norden turned to following the stalling of his Speculum. It is a bespoke and exclusive product drawn on vellum, showing for the royal landowners’ gratification their palaces and deer-stocked parks. This tradition of manuscript mapping of private estates would extend into the 20^th century, but county atlases such as Van den Keere’s became in many ways the principal English cartographic output, certainly up to the end of the 18^th century. This is proven by the strong afterlife of Van den Keere’s small county maps, which were reissued in various forms, including as a 'minature Speed atlas' (despite their having preceded Speed) up to 1676.

Pieter Van den Keere, England Wales Scotland and Ireland described and abridged ... from a farr larger Volume done by John Speed. London, 1627. Maps C.7.a.6.

Despite their obvious differences, the two Harley volumes have displayed an oddly close bond down the centuries, right up to the present day with their digitisation and placing online together. This might not have been the case had they suffered the fate that befell the rest of the Harleian collection in 1890 when, as part of a deal between the British Museum’s Departments of Printed Books and Manuscripts, the printed and manuscript material was separated and apportioned between the two.

With this in mind, it is serendipitous that the two atlases remain a just few shelves away from each other, albeit one a printed anomaly within a collection of the written and drawn.

References:

• Laurence Worms & Ashley Baynton-Williams, British map engravers: a dictionary of engravers, lithographers and their principal employers to 1850 (London: Rare Book Society, 2011).
• Sarah Bendall, Dictionary of land surveyors and local map-makers of Great Britain and Ireland 1530-1850. (London: British Library, 1997).
• Rodney Shirley, Maps in the atlases of the British Library: a descriptive catalogue c. AD 850-1800 (London: British Library, 2004).
• Atlas of the British Isles. By Pieter Van den Keere c. 1605 / Introduction by Helen Wallis (Lympne Castle, Kent: Harry Margary, 1972).
• Frank Kitchen, ‘John Norden (c. 1547-1625)’ in Oxford dictionary of national biography [accessed 5 December 2022].
• R.A. Skelton, County atlases of the British Isles, 1579-1850: a bibliography (London: Carta Press, 1970).
• Peter Barber, ‘Mapmaking in England, ca. 1470-1650’ in David Woodward (ed.), The history of cartography volume 3: part 2, cartography in the European Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 1589-1669.