Mapping London in 1666

Wenceslas Hollar's panorama of London before and after the Fire of 1666. Wikimedia Commons

The Great Fire of London swept through the city in four days in September 1666. The rebuilding took several years, and some elements, such as the new St Paul’s cathedral, were not completed for decades. Our project to map London on the eve of the Fire will take rather less time and manpower than that, but it is still a big task.

We announced the project a couple of years ago; this post outlined the context and the challenges involved, and some of the sources we will draw on. Thanks to generous support from the London Topographical Society, the City of London Archaeological Trust, the British Academy, and others, the project got under way in 2025, with publication planned for 2027. The project team comprises project lead Vanessa Harding, cartographic editor Giles Darkes, volunteer project manager Adele Sykes, and research assistants Richard Asquith, Michael Powell-Davies and Joe Saunders.

Team members and a guest at HTT's celebration on 22 October 2025. Photo credit: Daniela Luquini IG: @dlpictureuk

Our map (to be published in bound atlas format in 2027) will cover the whole of London as it was in 1666 - not just the city, but the built-up area from Westminster to Wapping and from Shoreditch to Southwark. The major, central phase of the project will be to map incrementally, parish by parish, but we began with the target of creating two resources covering the whole of London. The first of these is a database or ‘Working Directory’ of streets and street-names in immediate post-Fire London, using the maps of Ogilby & Morgan (1676) and Morgan (1682). Joe Saunders has collated and located the information from these maps as the baseline for our parish mapping, to be amended and enhanced with data from pre-Fire sources such as the Hearth Tax Returns from 1662-6. The second target was to survey and gather the available information on the archaeology of early modern London’s built environment, which is plentiful but widely scattered, and collate the results in usable form. Richard Asquith and Michael Powell-Davies searched a large number of journals, monographs, reports and the ‘grey literature’ from archaeological investigations for references to mappable features, and created a bibliography of sources, searchable by various keywords including place and parish. The Working Directory and Bibliography will be vital tools as we move to mapping London parish by parish.

In July/August 2025, the researchers collaborated with the cartographic editor on two pilot mapping studies, of the adjoining parishes of St Botolph Billingsgate and St George Botolph Lane in the City, and the parish of St Giles in the Fields in Westminster. The areas were chosen as presenting different challenges for both research and mapping: the first, in the area burnt in 1666, had been occupied since before the Norman Conquest, and was well-documented in a variety of sources; the second, on the fringe of the metropolis, well outside the burnt area, was undergoing rapid development in 1666 and was much less densely documented. While the pilot maps are still very experimental in form and appearance, doing this enabled us to develop a defined and transferable process for communicating mappable data, and to establish or refine parameters such as the appearance and conventions of the map, features to be represented, and place-name forms.

St George Botolph Lane and St Botolph Billingsgate: streets and names from 1666 overlaid on a 19th-century Ordnance Survey base. Historic Towns Trust

St Giles in the Fields: Streets and names from 1666 overlaid on a 19th-century Ordnance Survey base

As the examples show, 1666 features and place-names are overlaid on a late 19^th-century Ordnance Survey base. The 44 sheets at 1:1056 were acquired from the National Library of Scotland, and have been vector digitised for us by Lovell Johns, the firm co-founded by the first cartographer of the Historic Towns Atlas, Col. Henry Johns. The digitised base is now in the hands of the present cartographic editor for further work, before being used as the base for our historical mapping.

Thanks to a second grant from CoLAT, we will be able to employ two of the research assistants for several more months, focusing especially on mapping sites with a complex archaeological and documentary record such as palaces and playhouses.

While grants and donations already received have gone a long way towards funding the totality of the project, we are still seeking support from individuals or organisations to help us bring the atlas to publication in 2027. Donations (with GiftAid, if possible) can be made through the website, or contact us for further information. All donations will be gratefully received and acknowledged in the published atlas.

As the project proceeds, we will keep subscribers to our Newsletter informed; and in the meantime, Joe Saunders is giving an online talk on the project to the British Association for Local History at 7 pm on Tuesday 27 January.