Last Watched

"John Rocque"  Sort by

City Maps

   2010    Culture
This is the story of three maps, three 'visions' of London over three centuries. The Morgan Map of 1682 was the first to show the whole of the City of London after the Great Fire of London. In 1746 John Rocque produced at the time the most detailed map ever made of London. Like Morgan's, Rocque's map is all neo-Classical beauty and clinical precision, but the London it represented had become the opposite. In engravings of the time, such as Night, the artist William Hogarth shows a city boiling with vice and corruption. Stephen Walter's contemporary image, The Island, plays with notions of cartographic order and respectability. His extraordinary London map looks at first glance to be just as precise and ordered as his hero Rocque's but, looking closer, it includes 21st century markings such as 'favourite kebab vans' and sites of 'personal heartbreak'.
Series: The Beauty of Maps
Get Gotti

Get Gotti

2023  History
The Jinx

The Jinx

  History
The Great Acceleration

The Great Acceleration

2020  Technology
The Lost Pirate Kingdom

The Lost Pirate Kingdom

2021  History
Planet Earth

Planet Earth

2007  Nature
Neanderthal

Neanderthal

  History