John Wood’s Town Maps in South-West England

Devon Town Maps in the Nineteenth Century

The nineteenth century was a time of urban expansion and improvement. Maps of towns were needed for many reasons: to plan developments in housing, transport, water supply and sewers; to define new borough and ward boundaries; and to help visitors find their way around. All towns were eventually covered by the regular large-scale maps of the Ordnance Survey, but for many towns in Devon that was not until the late 1880s. Up until then, private mapmakers produced maps of individual towns at different times and for different purposes. More maps were produced for large towns, and for seaside towns that attracted tourists, than for small market towns.

One of the aims of the Devon in 1840 series is to create new large-scale maps of the towns of Devon, showing them as they were around 1840. The chosen scale is usually 1:2500, sufficient to show houses and other buildings individually, as well as the streets, parks, and so on. For each town, the map is based mainly on one original source of about the right date, although other sources may also be used to supply additional details. Whether this is feasible for each town depends on having a suitable base map. Regrettably, a few towns have to be omitted from the series because no adequate source map exists. This is the case for South Molton and Totnes, for example. Large-scale Ordnance Survey maps are not suitable because they were too late. (A possible exception to that would be Plymouth, which was mapped by the Ordnance Survey at the early date of 1856, presumably because of the military importance of Devonport. However, there are no immediate plans to cover Plymouth in this series.)

The tithe maps that were made around 1840 are a very good source for some towns, but disappointing for others. For example, Crediton, Exmouth, Ilfracombe and Okehampton are all shown in detail on the tithe maps of their respective parishes. Very often, however, tithe maps that include towns show little more than the limits of the urban area and perhaps the street outlines. Built-up land is left blank. This is the case for Barnstaple, Bideford, Newton Abbot, Teignmouth and Totnes, amongst others. Entirely urban parishes might have had no need for a tithe survey at all, and for that reason there is no tithe map for most of Dartmouth or Kingsbridge, and none for Exeter within the city wall.

John Wood’s Town Maps

Map by John Wood — Map of Kingsbridge by John Wood, 1841. (Devon Heritage Centre: image used with permission of South West Heritage Trust.)

By good fortune, one of the foremost producers of town maps in nineteenth-century Britain was active in Devon at just this time. Probably from Yorkshire originally, John Wood was based in Edinburgh and produced more than fifty maps of Scottish towns between 1818 and 1826. Wood went on to publish maps of towns in northern England, the Midlands and Wales. By 1840 he was working from an office in Paul Street, Exeter, from where he produced maps of twenty towns in the south-western counties in just four years. Most of those towns were either in Devon or just outside its borders, but he also ventured further east to cover Lymington, Poole and Weymouth in 1841, and even produced a map of St Peter Port in the Channel Islands in 1843. Wood then returned to Scotland, producing maps of Kirkcudbright, Stranraer and Castle Douglas before his death in 1847.

John Wood’s maps were printed, but it seems only in very small numbers, because no more than a few copies of each map survive today. In fact, there are some towns for which Wood’s work is known from only a single original print. For several years now, I have been enquiring at archives, libraries and museums from time to time, trying to find prints of John Wood’s maps of towns in and around Devon. I have found that he produced maps of Exeter, Taunton and Tiverton in 1840, Chard, Crewkerne, Kingsbridge, Lyme Regis and Torquay in 1841, Bideford, Brixham, Launceston, Tavistock and Teignmouth in 1842, and Barnstaple, Great Torrington and Newton Abbot in 1843. It is possible that this is an incomplete list, and I would be pleased to hear about any others.

In comparison with those of John Tallis and other town map publishers of the period, John Wood’s maps are less decorative and much more detailed. Their scale is typically either 2 chains to 1 inch (1:1584) or 3 chains to 1 inch (1:2376), although his Exeter map is 4 chains to 1 inch (1:3168). Characteristically, Wood’s maps are labelled with the names of the larger property owners, and have non-cartographic information on them such as the town’s population, the dates of annual fairs, or a table of distances or ‘post miles’ to other towns. Some of them have a small-scale inset showing the environs of the town (e.g. Barnstaple and Tavistock). The name John Wood may be prominent in the map’s title, or present only in small print on the bottom edge along with the name of the printer, Turner & Co of Edinburgh.

The accuracy of John Wood’s maps is a subject that deserves more research. Certainly they do not reach the standards of urban mapping produced by the Ordnance Survey later in the nineteenth century, and the detail on his maps should be interpreted with some caution by researchers. Nevertheless, for most of the towns they cover, they far exceed any other maps of their date in the amount of detail shown.

For the Barnstaple, Bideford and Great Torrington sheets of the Devon in 1840 series, I have created maps of those towns that are largely based on John Wood’s maps, but which also incorporate information from tithe maps of the surrounding countryside.

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Devon Town Maps in the Nineteenth Century

John Wood’s Town Maps

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