Digital Images Archive
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Lincoln Town Planning 'Map No 2' [1925]
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Town Planning was an important use of OS 25" maps in the inter-war years. In this era the maps were definitive, so needed to be accurate, and the regulations of 1910 advised that they should be updated locally to reflect recent changes. The OS were often commissioned to do this updating. Lincoln had asked for a special revision which was done in 1922. It stopped at the city boundary; it excluded the existing built-up area (outside the scope of the legislation) and also excluded a couple of areas which the city had not, it seems, intended to include within the Scheme.
Thus, the base map uses the Special Revision where it existed, and otherwise the previous sales edition. To this have been added occasional manuscript updates to 1925, when the map was issued. Over this, the Town Planning content has been drawn - explained by the key bottom right.
A couple of the sheets of the Special Revision have been found as delivered, but for most this composite provides the only specimen; users must take care to distinguish the printed map of 1922 from the MS updates. The composite is made up from 28 full 1:2500 sheets, so is about 14ft square. This may be exceptionally large, but Town Planning maps of this era tend to be unwieldy, which is perhaps why they are so little known. The image was assembled digitally from photographs of individual panels; some losses have occurred from creases at folds and alignment is not always perfect. But the original assembly of the map was less than satisfactory, especially the joins at the irregular boundary between Special Revision and sales copy. If one looks SW of HM Prison, just within the built-up area, one sees an area that is completely white; this is not a security deletion but is the County Hospital. Whoever assembled the map pasted down the Special Revision, but this corner of the Special Revision was left blank because it was within the built-up area. This example provides a reminder that the Special Revision sheetlines are unrelated to the normal ones - in fact they are portrait-format; they can be spotted by straight-line discontinuities on the composite.