Website Layers of London - including pre-war building plans

AJC

Western Thunderer
A new year plug for a project from work for an impressive and fascinating digital resource, Layers of London. The fundamental point of the project is to bring together and geo-rectify (accurately overlay, basically) historical maps of London (including all 35 modern boroughs) and to allow people - literally anyone - to pin their bits of historical information to it. The maps date from versions of medieval and Tudor London, through 17th, 18th and 19th century plans through to historic and modern OS mapping.You can read more about that here: Layers of London.

Perhaps the most useful, for modelling purposes, are the building control plans from Chislehurst and Sidcup Urban District Council from the first half off the 20th century - lots of detailed, dimensioned drawings of the kind of absolutely standard villas, semi-detached houses, bungalows, garages [Layers of London] and sheds that went up in their thousands more or less everywhere.

LASC_DC_4_2_311_2_plan001.jpg
There are also some more interesting structures such as the Crittal windows factory on the Sidcup bypass: Layers of London (and much of Sidcup High Street...).

The whole of this collection is accessible here: Layers of London. You can download the images for your use. Very handy indeed if you're casting around for prototype houses for layout purposes. If you've a bit of time on your hands you can explore the places these plans describe on Google Streetview and get a sense of whether the plans match what got built!

Adam

PS - It owes a lot to an earlier project that started in Bristol, Know Your Place West which has made early maps - notably tithe award maps from the 1830s (a bit early for most railways) - for Devon, Somerset, Wiltshire, Gloucestershire, Bristol and those awkward bits around it that were once called Avon available for free (again these are geo-rectified so overlay neatly): Know Your Place.
 
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AJC

Western Thunderer
This is an excellent resource Adam. Especially for the 1920-30 houses (villas) - ideal for Metroland.

It’s excellent for lots of things - though my colleagues would expect me to say that (as a tool for visualising the layout of the medieval city for example, it’s something of a game changer - it’s just that this particular collection, parallels of which exist in many local authority archives, is a modelling goldmine. At the smaller end there's are analogous buildings in every community in the Uk and those villas, terraces and bungalows crop up in ones and twos in all but the smallest villages. They’re rarely modelled properly though and now we’ve all a bit less of an excuse.

Adam
 
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