Old Maps Online is seriously impressive....

Here’s a great one. Spotted by The Aardvark on Twatter, curator of Burntwood Live and all round top chap. It’s a new site for old maps – it’s got lots of great material, including Ordnance Survey popular and inter-war editions, and the resolution and working area are great too, often a bit of a limitation on such services. Best of all, it’s absolutely free of charge to use.

Apparently, Old Maps Online is a project of The University of Portsmouth, and a jolly fine thing it is, too. The project’s About… page has this to say:

The OldMapsOnline Portal is an easy-to-use gateway to historical maps in libraries around the world.

It allows the user to search for online digital historical maps across numerous different collections via a geographical search. Search by typing a place-name or by clicking in the map window, and narrow by date. The search results provide a direct link to the map image on the website of the host institution.

OldMapsOnline has been created by a collaboration between The Great Britain Historical GIS Project based at The University of Portsmouth, UK and Klokan Technologies GmbH, Switzerland.

There are plenty of maps of our area to study, why not check it out?

Mapping quality is excellent, as this screenshot shows, this extract from a Boundary Commission report dated 1832. Click on the image to visit the map.