See they are now starting to put on 1:2500 England & Wales maps
http://maps.nls.uk/os/25inch-england-and-wales/index.html 

Superb quality (first edition on colour) but so far counties included perhaps of not so much interest to many of us.

Yep they look good but surprise, surprise, London, the centre of the universe first!

You would have thought they would have done Scotland first, being Scottish and all.

Just maybe they have to try and see what the interest in these maps is, before uploading more.
Now Scotland as everyone knows has only 1/12 th of the U.K. population, so by starting in the South East, you are effectively targeting 4 times as many.
A point indirectly mentioned by our Derby contributor.

oh how the other mapping sites are going to cry lol old maps £9.99 a month well i think i will just wait now

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You would have thought they would have done Scotland first, being Scottish and all.

Help ma Boab!

Map Series of Scotland:

Ordnance Survey, 25 inch to the mile, 1st edition - 1855-1882 - 13,045 sheets
Ordnance Survey, 25 inch to the mile, 2nd and later editions - 1892-1949 - 17,466 map sheets

http://maps.nls.uk/series/index.html 

You would have thought they would have done Scotland first, being Scottish and all.

Help ma Boab!

Map Series of Scotland:

Ordnance Survey, 25 inch to the mile, 1st edition - 1855-1882 - 13,045 sheets
Ordnance Survey, 25 inch to the mile, 2nd and later editions - 1892-1949 - 17,466 map sheets

http://maps.nls.uk/series/index.html 

Fantastic- I've just spent a happy half hour exploring Victorian Dundee.

Very happy to see the SE done first. Loads of good finds for South East sites! Remember, SE is a remote backwater for mining stuff. 😉 I have been quietly exploring this NLS site for some time now. It's a gem.

And the 1:1056 maps of London (1890s) will keep you occupied for a long time if you love old maps. The amount of industrial sites, railways, canals, docks, tramways etc etc is mind-blowing.

Just been looking at the Kent marshes - more obscure railways than you can shake a stick at - wonderful.

They have also got First world war trench maps.

These now extend to Cornwall Devon & Somerset

My mistake, not somerset yet.

My late father was site manager when the NLS building was substantially extended (or was it all new, I can't remember), Obviously as well as running a building site he had quite a lot of contact with the library management, and came away with prints of various old maps, 6 inch and 25 inch, or the area where they lived at the time, Kincardine, Alloa etc. I still have these.My old man was interested in mining, but did not do much underground stuff. He got the prints for free of course. It is good to see that it is on-line now, and anyone can have a look.

I am not sure if NLS have an absolutely complete set of maps, there are some parts that we may never see.

If Old-Maps dies out, I for one will not feel any sympathy for them. They actually sell stuff which, in original form, is long out of copyright, and put a fresh 70 year commercial copyright on it. That is quite objectionable, because they are not making a new "arrangement", which in all fairness can and does attract a new copyright, but merely reproducing a scan. Crown Copyright lasts for 50 years, from the end of the year of publication, so all OS maps, in original form, dating from 1965 or before, can now be copied freely. But only if you have an original.

Now 25-inch coverage has been extended into Somerset and Gloucestershire.

Waiting for wales...:):):)

(Mind you the 6-inch, especially the first ones, are very good as they were largely reductions from the 25-inch.)

Grahami

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I think i'm going to have a few years to wait before the North East arrives ;(;(

The library is doing a superb job in making these old maps available to browse and they should be applauded for their efforts.

The prices they charge for copies are also very reasonable. I bought some A2 sized copies of my local area, both black and white and colour to compare them (and because I enjoy perusing maps!) The service was very prompt and the quality of reproduction was excellent - much better than a certain firm that charges much more!

Kelvin

I also would like to say what a wonderful resource the NLS maps are and, in my case, how helpful the people at the library have been.

In his Gazetteer and Bibliography of the Mines and Quarries of north Wales, Jeremy Wilkinson references specific sheets of the first and second edition 6" county maps of north Wales in connection with a number of mine sites. Thanks to information provided by NLS I've been able to link those references to the individual sheet images – i.e. you can click on the sheet reference in the gazetteer and see the map sheet image.

Dave

Waiting for wales...:):):)

(Mind you the 6-inch, especially the first ones, are very good as they were largely reductions from the 25-inch.)

Grahami

On the first screen of the maps part of the NLS website (http://maps.nls.uk) there is the menu option "OS Record Sheets". Within this you can choose various series including "County Series 25 inch - 1841-1952" which brings up a zoomable map of the UK which shows almost all 1:2,500 sheets (a few that were definately published - including some moderately urban sheets - are unaccountably omitted); clicking on a sheet brings up the sheet number, survey date and publication date, along with the annotation "No copy in NLS" if the NLS does not hold a specific sheet in a specific edition. I've been randomly clicking around various parts of Wales and have been surprised at the substantial numbers of sheets for which NLS lacks copies of any edition. For many sheets they do hold an edition of, it is frequently only a late edition - their holdings of Welsh counties' 1st editions is very sparse.

They have now digitised around 50% of English 1:2,500 sheets (they did their Scottish 1:2,500 sheets at an earlier stage) and may reach Wales before the end of 2017 if their current impressive rate of progress is maintained. However don't get your hopes up too high with regard to Welsh sheets as it looks as though there will be very substantial gaps in Welsh coverage.