Digital Images Archive
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1:25000, sheet 4009
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1:25,000 scale, sheet 4009
This is the earliest complete wholly civilian 1:25,000 map known to have been printed by the Ordnance Survey, although it never went on sale in this form. Another, flat, copy is the first in a series of progressive specimens now in the Charles Close Society Archives in the Map Department of Cambridge University Library, reference CCSA.OS_L26.
What was later officially successively the Provisional Edition and the First Series of the civil 1:25,000 had its origins in mapping produced for military purposes from 1910 onwards, successively 1:25,344, 1:20,000 and 1:25,000. The use of 1:25,000 for civil purposes was suggested by the Davidson Committee in 1938: early intentions are unclear, but by 1940 a small newly-drawn section of the west end of London had been produced, on tracing paper, at the intended standard drawing scale of 1:15,000: a 1:25,000 reduction is in Roger Hellyer & Richard Oliver, Ordnance Survey Intermediate Scale Maps (Charles Close Society, 2022), p.53. (This book goes into the background of the 1:25,000 in detail.) The primary purpose of making this specimen seems to have been to assess the appearance of Caslon Old Roman when used for street names. This Caslon face (a form of Cheltenham) had been adopted by the OS in 1932 for large-scale mapping, and it was logical to use it for the nascent 1:25,000 series. It is a little odd that it was used for street-naming, as the OS had retained Egyptian for this on the 1:2500.
At any rate, further development of the 1:25,000 was halted by the war, and was only resumed in the autumn of 1943. By that time an experimental 1:1250 and 1:2500 resurvey of the Bournemouth area had been started, and it was intended that in due course the ‘final’ form of the 1:25,000 would be based on the national resurvey. A 1:25,000 sheet covering part of this area was to be produced, based on existing 1:10,560 mapping, in order that it could offer a ready comparison with a ‘final’ 1:25,000. This sheet was to be numbered 4009, this numbering being a shortened form of the National Grid reference for the south-west corner of the sheet: 400 kilometres east and 090 kilometres north of the ‘false origin’ of the grid. This numbering system had been devised around 1937, and was a development of the full co-ordinate method of reference used in conjunction with an earlier form of the grid, based on the yard. (In this system the 1:2500 sheet covering the southwesternmost square would be 400090; the sheet covering the northeasternmost would be 409099.)
Although about a tenth of Britain had been covered by a recompiled and redrawn 1:25,000 military series, GSGS 3906, this was not regarded as a sufficient basis for the new civil series, which was apparently wholly rethought and redesigned. One obvious difference was the lettering: GSGS 3906 had mainly used Egyptian, whereas sheet 4009 in its original form, as presented here, uses a mixture of Caslon and Modern Roman No.5. (These names are taken from the booklet, Ordnance Survey Alphabets, issued in 1934.) It is at first strange why two faces were used, as they don’t have the clear distinction of being serif (e.g. Caslon) and sans-serif (e.g. Egyptian), or between, say, Caslon and Times Roman, which would be adopted for the definitive form of this mapping. However, close study suggests that it was intended that Modern Roman would predominate in the NW quadrant, Caslon in the SE quadrant, and a mix of the two in the NE and SW quadrants, with a view to either retaining a mixture, or standardizing on the one or the other. Taking the south-west part of the map: the names POOLE, West Quay and Pottery use Caslon, and the contour figures, Holes Bay and Holes Bay Junction use Modern Roman. This mix of styles was later resolved in favour of first Modern Roman, and then complete replacement by Times Roman.
Eight separate versions of 4009 were produced between March and November 1944, one using a green plate for woods and parkland, and the final version being lettered in Times Roman throughout. Common to all of them was the infilling of ‘A’ and ‘B’ roads, by solid and dashed sienna or pinkish-red respectively, by an addition to the contour plate. The infill of buildings by hatching was later replaced, by grey infill requiring a separate printing. This initial version includes ‘S.B’ and ‘S.P’ for signal box and signal post on railways, which had not been part of the specification for GSGS 3906, and were evidently regarded as not needed, as they later disappeared. (Notice, by the way, the style of abbreviation: the final stop was deliberately omitted, in order that it should not be mistaken for the dot indicating the actual location of the object.) Some names of roads in built-up areas were added, entailing some widening of road casings.
The sheet numbering system was changed in 1944, to a form designating the 100 km square, followed by a stroke and the 10 km reference of the square within that larger square, thus ‘40/09’, with which number this sheet was published, in its final form, in the autumn of 1945. The National Grid was revised again in 1951, to bring the civil and military versions of it into agreement: 100 km squares were now designated by pairs of letters, and what had started as sheet 4009 was thereafter known as SZ09.