CHRISTOPHER & JOHN GREENWOOD

Christopher and John Greenwood were pioneering English cartographers and publishers active in the early 19th century. As brothers working in partnership, they are best known for producing some of the most detailed large-scale county maps of England and Wales, published between 1817 and 1834. Their maps combined careful surveying with elegant engraving and are celebrated for their accuracy, clarity, and decorative quality. Each map features an uncoloured vignette view of a place or building in the county. I have seen uncoloured specimens of these maps but more often they are found with original outline and wash hand colouring. Today, Greenwood maps are valued by historians, geographers, and collectors as important records of Britain’s during the Industrial Revolution.

The Greenwood's prepared large county maps of the English counties. Their maps of Welsh counties feature more than one county on a sheet. They are probably going to be the largest county maps in your collection. Also keep a lookout for an even larger series that were not published in atlas form but were sold mounted on linen and folded. Sometimes you will find one in its original nice slipcase.