What Did Your Street Look Like 150 Years Ago? The First Ordnance Survey Maps

If you live in Great Britain, there's a good chance someone walked past the spot where your house now stands with a measuring chain about 150 years ago. Between the 1840s and the 1880s, the Ordnance Survey mapped the country county by county at six inches to one mile. At that scale you can see single buildings, field boundaries, footpaths and even trees in a park.

What the six-inch map is

Six inches to one mile works out at 1:10,560. A mile of ground takes up six inches of paper, so a typical street of houses is a couple of centimetres long. The country was surveyed county by county, each with its own run of numbered sheets, which is why you'll see labels like "Oxfordshire sheet 56, surveyed 1877–78".

The survey started in the north of England in the 1840s and worked its way across Great Britain over the next forty years. So depending on where you live, your map might show the 1840s or the 1880s.

What you can spot on one

• Fields and their edges. Hedges and field boundaries are drawn as lines. On a modern estate, these are often the only clue to what was there before.
• Orchards and parkland. Orchards show as neat rows of little tree symbols. Big estates have their trees drawn one by one.
• Industry. Mills, brickworks, gravel and clay pits, wharves and "steam saw mills" are all named.
• Pubs. Inns are named, and smaller ones are marked "P.H." for public house. Plenty of them are still there.
• Lanes that became roads. A track across fields in 1870 is often a busy road now, still on the same line.
• Bench marks. The little "B.M." with a number is a height above sea level, cut into a wall or a church. Some of those marks can still be found today.

An example: Caversham in the 1870s

The picture at the top is Caversham, on the north bank of the Thames at Reading, from the sheet surveyed in 1877–78. Caversham Bridge is there, and so is Fry's Island in the river. There's a steam saw mill by the water and the White Hart nearby. Up the hill, St Peter's Hill and Priest Lane run through what was still mostly fields and orchards. Much of that ground is houses now.

How to find your own street on one

Our old map of your home does the searching for you. Put in your address or postcode and it finds the right sheet, places your house on it and circles it. If your street was built after the survey, it draws today's roads over the old map in red, so you can see your house sitting in what used to be a field.

You add your own words (a family name, "Where Dad grew up", the year you moved in) and choose from three colourways. You see the whole poster before you pay.

Where it won't work yet

The maps cover most of Great Britain. Northern Ireland was surveyed separately and isn't in this series. A few areas, including some large Yorkshire towns such as Leeds and Sheffield, aren't available to us yet. The maker tells you straight away if your address isn't covered.

Where the maps come from

We use scans of the original sheets that are in the public domain because of their age, held on Wikimedia Commons. Each poster says which sheet it comes from and when that sheet was surveyed, in small print along the bottom.

Who it's for

An old map of someone's street makes a good gift for anyone who likes to know where they're from: a parent who grew up in the same town all their life, someone who's just bought their first house, or a dad for Father's Day. If you'd rather have a whole town, see our ready-made old map prints.

Find your street on the old map →