I set out to read about the slums of London in 1814, and found myself with two wonderful maps. The one above was produced in 1812, and shows the city a couple of years before my work-in-progress. Look at the parks and wide streets to the west of the ancient heart of the city. To the east we see industry and docks. That was the way the wind blew. Even when Shakespeare was alive, the city’s stink reached noses fifty miles away. It wasn’t any sweeter in Regency times, what with coal fires and the smell of a million people, all their associated animals, and the sewage they collectively produced. Of course the rich preferred to live to the West.
The second map was the last to show every single building in London, and was drawn in 1799. You’ll find a digitised, fully scaleable, version of it here. As the characters in my 3rd and 4th Mountain King books venture into the slum kingdom of my villain, this is going to be extremely useful. Now to decide precisely where to put my imaginary Devil’s Kitchen.
I need to see more details. I have a book of London A story in maps but even those are difficult for me to read. I really would like to find a pre1834 map with a view of the Houses of Parliament from the Thames that gives me a good image of the buildings
Yes, it’s hard to imagine what we cannot see.
Maps are so important in any setting the reader is unlikely to personally know. I don’t know the geographical layout of any modern location, aside from a smattering about New York City and the gradual changes of my home city a good distance away. It becomes even more important for original settings and fantastic, You know the author has not done their homework for a Regency tale in London or Bath or even the hero’s estate when they make railroad station details or car travel times instead of canals. A detailed map like any surviving medieval map means the author thought about more than the pretty staff uniforms. In SF you can tell who’s even checked travel times from the creator’s materials when new authors do a story. One world the new writers are painfully clear they did not consult the maps when travel time is hours at warp when maps and the universe wiki show it to be a week.
You don’t have to do much research to get travel times: distance and speed, but not doing it is so sloppy it reduces the believability of the (even fantastic) story. The consequences of realistic travel times can add an extra level of problems too.
I love maps and house plans and the like. It helps me visualise. Even in an invented landscape, I need a map, so I’ll make one.