Rocque Plan of London, 1746

The story of this map

John Rocque, a Huguenot surveyor working in London, spent the better part of a decade measuring the capital for this plan. Published in 1746 on twenty-four sheets and engraved by John Pine, it was the most detailed survey of London anyone had produced, and it remains the map historians reach for when they want to know what Georgian London actually looked like.

It is astonishingly dense. Every street and alley is named, every block of houses hatched in, the Thames curving through the middle and old London Bridge still carrying its houses. Around the edges the city simply stops and becomes fields, market gardens and country lanes, with Hyde Park and Marylebone out on the western fringe and the villages that would one day be swallowed up still standing on their own.

This was London two decades before the American Revolution, a city of coffee houses, watermen and new Georgian squares. Nearly every street in the old centre can still be walked today, which is half the fun of the print: find your office, your favourite pub, or the church where an ancestor was married.

We print it as a wide panorama so the whole survey reads at once. It belongs to our Antique Maps of Europe collection and pairs naturally with the Turgot plan of Paris from a few years earlier. Ideal for a long wall in a hallway, kitchen or office. Each print is made to order on archival matte paper and framed in the country of delivery.

Before and after

Left: the archive scan exactly as published. Right: the file that goes to the printer.

Archive scanRestored

Restoration notes

Restoration plan: work from the archive's single composite scan of all 24 sheets, evening out tonal differences and joins between sheets; crop scan margins, balance colour cast and levels while keeping the paper tone, remove library stamps and scanner artefacts if present, gentle sharpening. No repainting of original content.

Every print carries its archive credit on the packing slip. Paper tone and small imperfections of the original are kept on purpose; nothing is redrawn.