Old Maps for Local History Research

Although Ordnance Survey maps chart the most significant changed in Liverpool’s history, older maps often are unique. They show details or aspects which no other map does, and can often show what was important to the map-maker. You can’t beat old maps for laying bare the great changes of a city like Liverpool.

Modern maps are often much more ‘objective’ in comparison. But old maps are still of use to the local historian, at the same time as being beautiful objects.

Early Liverpool Maps

Liverpool developed from seven streets, laid out at its founding in 1215. Soon there was a castle, a chapel and the Tower, a fortified house built by the Stanley family in 1404. Maps of this period (1205-1700) do exist, most of them drawn later. Here are a few of the easiest plans of Liverpool to get hold of.

William Ashton included a simple sketch of 17th century Liverpool in his book ‘Evolution of a Coastline’ in 1920 (above).

Ashton also drew a top-down plan of Liverpool:

The book itself has recently been reprinted, so if you want a higher resolution copy you can pick up ‘Evolution of a Coastline‘ at Amazon.

Genmaps

Genmaps is a map site hosted by Rootsweb (funded and supported by Ancestry.com), and has a page on Lancashire maps. There’s a huge range, so I’ve collected the Liverpool entries in the following table. If you’re reading this in the dim and distant future, I recommend going to the original page, hitting Ctrl+F on your keyboard and searching for ‘liverpool’ to catch newer uploads.

Note: as of 25th November 2022 the Genmaps website is back ‘Under construction’, so none of the below links to them work. I’ll keep on eye on things and update the links when they’re available.

Pre-19th century

Name	Date	Map-maker and Notes
Liverpool	Early 18th century	Bird’s eye view. Map maker not known
Swire’s plan of Liverpool	1720	William Wales – Wales & Co. Castle Street Liverpool. This is actually a tiny insert on the much bigger map by Swire from 1824.

19th century

Name	Date	Map-maker and Notes
Liverpool, street plan	ca.1801	George Cole. engr.J.Roper  in The British Atlas
Lancashire	1809	John Cary
Liverpool, Warrington, Leigh area	1809	John Cary (detail of map above)
Liverpool	1832	Lt. Robert Dawson in Plans of the Cities and Boroughs of England and Wales: shewing their boundaries as established by the Boundaries’ Act, passed 11th July 1832
Liverpool, street plan	ca.1833	(includes plan of  Liverpool in 1729) Society for the Diffusion of Knowledge. This is a hand-coloured (but smaller) version of my map by Mickleburgh, completed with engraved building profiles along the bottom.
Plan of the Liverpool Docks	1846	Jesse Hartley (Dock Surveyor) engr. C.B. Graham, Washington, D.C.
Environs of Liverpool	1850	Thomas Cowperthwait (inset detail from England)
Liverpool Docks	ca.1860	J.Bartholomew for R. Fullarton.
Liverpool	1863	John Dower, published in The Weekly Dispatch
South West Liverpool	1863	B.R.Davies (detail from Liverpool map  in The Weekly Dispatch Atlas). Historic Liverpool has a much bigger and zoomable verion of the Weekly Dispatch Atlas.
Liverpool-Birkenhead area	ca.1870	A.Fullarton (detail from The Environs of Liverpool and the Estuaries of the Mersey & Dee)
The Town and Borough of Liverpool	1880	J. Bartholomew. (detail)
Plan of Liverpool	1881	Charles Letts
Liverpool.-sewers,contourlines and municipal boundaries	1882	Map maker not known
Liverpool – city plan	1883	George W. Bacon in The New Ordnance Atlas of the British Isles
Liverpool (Eastern Section)	1885	Report of the Boundary Commissioners for England and Wales. There’s a link through to a higher resolution version.
Liverpool (Western Section)	1885	Report of the Boundary Commissioners for England and Wales.
Liverpool	1897	Century Atlas Company. (detail from map of England and Wales) Quite a tiny map!
Liverpool	1898	Meyer in German lexikon Brockhaus. Published by Leipzig Bibliographisches Institut. Notable for being a German language map.

20th century

Name	Date	Map-maker and Notes
Liverpool: town-plan (and detail)	1900	K.Baedeker
Environs of Liverpool & the estuaries of the Mersey and Dee	ca.1910	J.Bartholomew
Liverpool Docks	1920	George Phillip (detail from The New Mercantile Marine Atlas)
Liverpool	1922	G.Bartholomew (detail from The Towns of England in The Times Atlas)

Some of them are high resolution, and some not. Others have links to higher resolution versions of extracts below them.

Lancashire County Council

Lancashire County Council has the best collection of old maps for any student of Liverpool history. It runs from a reproduction of Gough’s 1320 map, through all the major map makers: Speed, Yates, Greenwood, Hennet.

Greenwood’s map of Lancashire from 1818, is undoubtedly the best! Click on the exact point you’re interested in, as this map has been cut up into sections when added to the site.

Old Maps of Liverpool

It will take a fuller article to go into all details hidden in maps like these. For us today they provide an immediate visual visit on the past, easy to interpret. For this reason one of my favourites has to be this 1833 Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge map (if only for the name!) I now have a high resolution, zoomable version of this map.

It shows quite a lot of detail, including Bootle Castle at the end of Regent Street, an unfamiliarly station-free Lime Street, and is detailed right out to Kensington (the edge of the city back then). Click on the map to zoom in.

Oldest of the old maps

Finally, I want to mention a map I only saw for the first time recently. It is included in the modern edition of The Calderstones by Ron Cowell. The map was made in 1568 to help solve a boundary dispute between Allerton and Wavertree. Not only does it show the Calderstones, but it also shows the mysterious Rodgerstone and the Pikeloo Hill.

The Rodgerstone might have been a single standing stone, while the Pikeloo Hill could be a burial mound. The Pikeloo Hill could even have been as large as Silbury Hill, a prehistoric mound in Wiltshire.

Not only does this seem to be the oldest map of the Liverpool area. It’s also a tantalising glimpse of a prehistoric complex now long lost. The map isn’t online, so if anyone has a high resolution scan, do get in touch.

Well, that rounds off this brief excursion into Liverpool maps. There are certainly some I’ve missed, so please share your own sources in the comments!

Image: Extract from the Greenwood map of Lancashire, 1818, available in full on the Lancashire County Council Old Maps of Lancashire website (you’ll need to scroll down the story to find Greenwood), or you can see a better quality, though non-coloured, version of Greenwood’s Map on the National Library of Scotland’s website.