The Ordnance Survey Drawings are a series of 351 of the original preliminary drawings made by the surveyors of the

Ordnance Survey The Ordnance Survey (OS) is the national mapping agency for Great Britain. The agency's name indicates its original military purpose (see Artillery, ordnance and surveying), which was to map Scotland in the wake of the Jacobite rising of ...

between the 1780s and 1840 in preparation for the publication of the one-inch-to-the-mile "Old Series" of maps of England and Wales. The drawings are now held in the

British Library The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom. Based in London, it is one of the largest libraries in the world, with an estimated collection of between 170 and 200 million items from multiple countries. As a legal deposit li ...

, and cover most of England south of a line between

Liverpool Liverpool is a port City status in the United Kingdom, city and metropolitan borough in Merseyside, England. It is situated on the eastern side of the River Mersey, Mersey Estuary, near the Irish Sea, north-west of London. With a population ...

and

Kingston upon Hull Kingston upon Hull, usually shortened to Hull, is a historic maritime city and unitary authorities of England, unitary authority area in the East Riding of Yorkshire, England. It lies upon the River Hull at its confluence with the Humber Est ...

, as well as parts of Wales. The drawings provide a unique record of landscapes and land use in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, of the expanding canal and turnpike road networks, and of place-names. They are now of interest to a range of researchers, including landscape historians, social historians, transport historians, students of place-names, and

genealogist Genealogy () is the study of families, family history, and the tracing of their Lineage (anthropology), lineages. Genealogists use oral interviews, historical records, genetic analysis, and other records to obtain information about a family ...

s. They can be seen on the Online Gallery at the British Library website.

References

{{Reflist Ordnance Survey