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MacDonald Gill's Final Map?

Rare promotional pictorial map of the Colne Valley Cloth District, drawn by MacDonald Gill, perhaps the most famous of all British Pictorial map artists.

A credit at the bottom right notes that "This Map of the Huddersfield & District Woollen Export Group was designed by MacDonald Gill in 1946.

This part of Yorkshire was then a major source of textile production. The map provides a marvelous image of the factories, reservoirs, and transportation routes necessary to facilitate creation and distribution.   It has been speculated that this is likely Gill's final pictorial map, before he passed away in 1947.

As noted in the description of the map in the PJ Mode Persuasive Map Collection at Cornell

This map was issued in 1947 with a book by Phyliss Bentley promoting the Colne Valley, an area in West Yorkshire, England, that has been home to weavers for centuries. With ready access to water power and the cities of Liverpool and Manchester, the mills of the Colne Valley were an important part of the industrial revolution (Bentley 35-54). But the Great Depression and World War II had taken its toll on the Valley's producers (Ibid. 63-70). The book and map were produced by The Huddersfield and District Woollen Export Group as part of a post-war effort to gain sales in foreign markets.

The map portrays the Colne Valley as a bustling manufacturing center|scores of mills line the waterways, each with hard-at-work puffs of smoke from the chimneys. Around the margin are medallions with images of historical sites and great homes in the area. And illuminating the Valley from the upper right corner is a sunburst, an image often used by the artist, MacDonald Gill.

Gill was one of the best-known commercial and patriotic artists of his time. He "produced a great many advertisements which made use of maps [using] a striking, colourful, pictorial style . . . . Boldness and information, within an instantly recognizable cartographic framework, offered real scope for the purposes of advertising and propaganda." (Barber 2010, 166). For other examples of Gill's work, see ID #2015 "Time & Tide Map of the Atlantic Charter" (1942); #2194, "The World in the Time of Cabot" (1924). This was one of the last works produced by Gill, who finished the map in 1946 and died in January 1947.