About the maps ...

University of Hull

The Victorian maps

All of the maps used in this project were surveyed by the Ordnance Survey of Great Britain at a scale of six inches to one mile between 1849 and 1852. The figure to the right shows the sheet numbers and survey dates of the Holderness coast sheets.

The surveys were performed under the direction of Captain Barlow, Captain Bayly and Lieutenant Elphinstone, of the Royal Engineers. In the mid 19th century all surveys were performed by careful levelling and measurement. Despite this the maps have been found to be remarkably accurate and match the aerial photographs extremely well.

The maps were scanned at 150 dpi from sheets in the University Map Library. This relatively low resolution was selected to give a close approximation to the 2m resolution of the aerial photographs. After cleaning up in Paintshop, the scanned images were georeferenced and resampled using the ESRI ArcView GIS. They were then brought back into Paintshop and superimposed on the photographs.