Digital Images Archive
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One-inch (1:63,360) New Forest, 1945 proof, with National Grid
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78. The one-inch 'New Forest' tourist map was published in 1938, based on Fifth Edition drawings. Although carrying the yard grid which was current at the time, the map was actually laid out on sheet lines conforming with the new metric grid which had been one of the recommendations of the Davidson Committee. But for the war, the National Grid, as it came to be known, might have come into use in 1939; in the event its first appearance at the one-inch scale was delayed until 1945. 'New Forest' was one of several pre-war tourist and district maps that the Ordnance Survey had plans to issue in the years following the war, but as with most of them was to suffer loss of priority and in the event to be cancelled. But not before the map reached proof stage, and a single copy of the map in proof form, carrying the National Grid for which it had been designed, is known to survive.
From a copy now transferred to the Charles Close Society Archive – CCS L101/4.