Ogilby's Road from Coventry to Derby

The Road from Oxford to Coventry continued to Darby...

This map was published as sheet 82 in the 1698 folio edition of Ogilby’s pioneering road atlas, the Britannia. 

Thousands of miles of roads were surveyed for the project, smaller towns appeared in detail for the first time, and it was largely thanks to Ogilby’s influence that the Statute Mile was set at 1760 yards.  

Ogilby devised the project late in life. His biographer Alan Ereira explores Ogilby's earlier incarnations in The Nine Lives of John Ogilby as a dancing master, soldier, spy, theatre impresario and translator, through which Ogilby survived the turbulent 17th century. Ereira also presents a provocative new reading of Ogilby's innovative and beautiful road atlas as a work of royalist propaganda – even expressed through the routes which he chose to include or emphasise.

Condition & Materials
Copper engraving, printed area measures34 x 44.5 cm. Modern hand colour, blank verso.