Lancashire County Council Logo | Listen | Home | A to Z | Feedback | Complaints | Your Council | Business | Residents | Visitors |
These online versions of Old Maps of Lancashire were produced by The Environment Directorate's Archaeology Service. Part of the remit of this service is to educate and inform the public about Lancashire's historic environment.
We currently have 8 full county maps of Lancashire for online viewing. In addition we now have several town maps c.1890 based on the 1:2500 OS first editions and some based on the 1:10,560 first editions of 1845, plus one Tithe Map.
If you are interested in locating old Parishes then the OS Index of early editons map is probably the best place to start.
Many of the original paper maps from which these digital versions were scanned are held in the Lancashire Record Office , where they can be inspected. If you are interested in studying old maps or tracing family history then this is the place to go. They also offer for sale maps on CD-ROM, currently Hennet and Yates (Lancashire), Jeffery's (Yorkshire) and a 3 CD-ROM set of 1:2500 first editions (c.1893) of pre-1974 Lancashire. Contact them direct if you are interested.
Mario , our new online Geographic Information System (GIS) includes historic maps of more of Lancashire at scales of 1:10,600 (c.1845) and 1:2500 (c.1890) for several towns. Modern aerial photographs are also available for all of Lancashire. Because of internet limitations the map area is smaller than the maps here but if you are interested in an area not covered here then it is definitely the place to try.
Note: In 1974 the administrative boundaries of Lancashire were redrawn and the Counties of Greater Manchester and Merseyside formed. Apart from the whole county maps we have no detailed maps of those areas.
NEW - 1609 Map of Ormskirk (see Other Maps section below)
1934 Ellis Martin Map Cover
Ellis Martin Cover, 1934.
Note publication dates 1953-1955
These maps have been scanned at 200dpi and are reproduced here at generally half that resolution. Several of them had to be scanned as greyscale to retain legibility and have had to be published as jpegs with some loss of quality.
Printing these maps can be a problem if you only have an A4 printer. You can change the format to landscape and get a bit wider. The alternative is to centre the area you are interested in on the screen, then press the PrtSc (printscreen) key to put it in the clipboard. By opening a package such as Word or Powerpoint, you can then paste in the screen image and print from there. Another method is to right click on the map tile and save it to your computer. You can then open it in Paintshop or similar graphics programme, crop it and print at any scale.
WindowsXP/Internet Explorer 6: By default this browser resizes images to fit the screen. To view the maps full size you will need to un-tick the resize images box under:- Tools> Internet Options> Advanced> Multimedia.
Copyright: This is complex as both these scans and the base maps are separately subject to copyright! As regards the original paper maps, Crown copyright (eg OS maps) lasts for 50 years, everything else for 70 years. The base maps from which these scans were derived are now (believed to be) out of copyright but these scans are copyright Lancashire County Council. There is no objection to using these maps for personal research but they cannot be reproduced elsewhere. If you need to refer to them then please link to them here and include an acknowledgement to Lancashire County Council.
Note: Lancashire County Council is not responsible for the content of external Internet sites
Divider
Contact
For queries and suggestions regarding these maps email :
archaeology@lancashire.gov.uk
