Three specific undertakings in the history of urban mapping in Great Britain over the last two centuries will be considered from a particularly Scottish point of view, beginning with the work of John Wood, a 19th century Edinburgh-based cartographer whose plans of Scottish towns, dating from 1818 to 1844 are reasonably well-known. Current research has identified a further series of plans of towns across much of England and Wales which warrant investigation. A century later, the Ordnance Survey produced an equally rare series of Town Maps at the uniform scale of six inches to the mile, in which Dundee was the only Scottish burgh surveyed. Both these sets of plans mapped the contemporary urban environment. Finally, the work of the Historic Towns Trust in the production of historical maps will be considered.

John Moore is a retired academic librarian from the University of Glasgow who has researched the history of cartography for more than forty years. A specialist in the mapping of his native Scotland, he is the author of two successful books on the mapping of Glasgow and of the River Clyde.