About this map

By 1851 London was the centre of an Empire and had started modernising and expanding at an unprecedented rate. The Great Exhibition in that year was expected to attract visitors from all over the country and the world. Most would need some help finding their way around London. James Wyld saw an opportunity to sell them large quantities of a cheap, portable map. It was not presented as of the finest quality or greatest detail, but as a practical, affordable necessity.

The fact that so many copies have survived shows that he achieved that aim and makes it more readily available now than most other maps of the time.

In making this edition, my objectives were clarity, simplicity and speed, without changing the look of the original or interfering more than was necessary with the content.

Some of the plates do not exactly match their adjacent parts and some appear slightly skewed. I have adjusted these as much as possible but the problem lies with the original print, not the scanning process. Every copy I have seen suffers from some form of creasing of the paper during production that causes small gaps or blurring of the print. This is always worst at the edges. I do not know enough about the printing process used to know why this happened.

The maps were scanned at 600 dpi and cleaned and squared up using Adobe Photoshop. The pages and links were coded by hand then checked and adjusted using Adobe Dreamweaver. Everything has been validated as XHTML 1.0 compliant by the W3C and works exactly as planned with the 5 most common browsers.

All the pages are optimised for use with a screen resolution of 1980 x 1080 pixels (Full HD) because that has become the most common size of desktop computer monitor. The wider plates fit this size. The individual plates are at a larger scale, but are narrower to fit the most common laptop screens, which are 1366 x 768. If your screen is bigger or smaller, see these instructions for changing the size.

Whilst pouring over the map to create the index, I sometimes found it helpful to reduce the size of the map to decipher some street names, rather than making it bigger. Experiment to find the right size for your screen; all mainstream browsers can do this.