Reynolds’s Map and Strangers Guide through London

Reynolds’s Map and Strangers Guide through London published by James Reynolds of 174 Strand in 1848. Reynolds was one of the leading London mapmakers of the 1840s–60s. The hand-coloured engraved map is dissected into 30 sections and mounted on linen, folding within the original green cloth case boards, which are gilt-lettered to the front board and blind-embossed with rococo corner ornaments to a ruled border.

Bound into the case with the map is Reynolds’s 11-page companion guide booklet for visitors to London, comprising an alphabetical index of “One Thousand References” to the principal streets and squares, a six-day sightseeing itinerary, notes on omnibuses, steamboats, cabs and hackney coach fares, Post Office delivery times, and a list of the sights and amusements of London open daily and on set days — a snapshot of how a mid-nineteenth-century visitor navigated the capital before the Underground.

The map itself covers London from roughly Hoxton and Pentonville in the north to Walworth and Peckham in the south, and from Hyde Park in the west to the docks and Blackwall Reach in the east, with parks in green, waterways in blue, and principal roads picked out in ochre.