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Attractive example of Greenwood’s map of Shropshire, the product of an ambitious private survey carried out by Christopher and John Greenwood at a moment of transition in English cartography. Published just as the Ordnance Survey’s six-inch sheets were beginning to appear, the Greenwood maps marked the high-water point of independent commercial topography in the British Isles.
The Greenwoods, Yorkshire-born brothers, spent more than a decade measuring and engraving their suite of English county maps. Working on foot with surveyor’s chains and drawing instruments, they aimed to publish a detailed large-scale map of every county, supported by subscriptions and direct sales. Their map of Salop was compiled from field surveys made in 1826 and 1827 and engraved by the eminent firm of J. & C. Walker. The title cartouche boasts that the map is “corrected to the present period,” indicating revisions and additions made in the run-up to its publication in 1830.
Their work was targeted at landowners, magistrates, industrialists, and navigators, that is, those with a professional stake in the landscape. But it also reflected a growing demand for local knowledge in an era of parliamentary reform and economic transformation. Greenwood maps provided a practical tool for assessing roads, canals, agricultural lands, parks, and infrastructure at a time when industrial England was being reshaped.
The county is divided into its historical Hundreds, each outlined in color, with parishes, turnpike roads, toll bars, canals, commons, and pleasure grounds all distinctly rendered. Although railways are included in the key, none yet appear in Shropshire. Canals, by contrast, are fully developed, including the Shrewsbury and Ellesmere canals, marking the routes of early industrial movement.
Market towns that returned Members to Parliament are indicated with a distinctive double-ring symbol, and dozens of churches, mills, and manor houses are recorded. In the lower left corner, a finely executed vignette of Shrewsbury by Shepherd shows the county town viewed from the southwest, across the Severn with its spires rising amid a broad prospect of wooded hills and scattered villas.
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