Rediscovering the treasures of the UCL Map Library

15 December 2025

On the lower ground floor of the UCL Institute of Education Building - a brutalist icon – lies the UCL Map Library. This a unique collection of maps, charts and atlases was assembled throughout the twentieth century, and its significance is only now being widely recognised.

Stored in 440 wooden drawers are thousands of maps from around the globe, depicting nearly every corner of the planet. It’s a rare cartographic archive, and one of the few remaining in a UK university geography department. But even though passersby on the bustling Bedford Way can see its rows of storage cabinets through the window, it has been largely overlooked in recent years.

Professor James Cheshire (UCL Geography) first arrived at UCL in 2008 as PhD student, rising through the ranks to become the inaugural Director of the UCL Social Data Institute in 2021 and Britain’s only Professor of Geographic Information and Cartography. Although he always knew of the library, it was only when Emeritus Professor Peter Wood suggested using the space for teaching students that Professor Cheshire fully appreciated the full significance of the collection.

Since then, he’s delved deep into the archives to begin to digitally catalogue and understand the collection and now brings hundreds of students to the library to highlight how the past can inform the future of cartography and mapmaking.

His research culminated in a richly illustrated book, The Library of Lost Maps, which brings to light some of the most extraordinary maps hidden in the collection. Many have never been seen in public before and offer insights and new perspectives into some of the most significant periods of world history.

The book reveals UCL’s deep ties with geography and map making, featuring pioneering maps from early educational reformers from1800s, maps used to negotiate peace at the end of the First World War, captured German maps from the Second World War, donations from institutions such as the Bodleian and the Royal Geographical Society. It even includes rescued collections from other universities that have shuttered their map libraries.

Professor Cheshire said: “This archive is an incredible assemblage of maps that touch on nearly every aspect of cartography. UCL is fortunate to have such a trove available for researchers and students. It’s been a tremendous honour to rediscover the collection and share it more widely with the public.”

Here we produce five maps that highlight the history, depth and breadth of the collection.

Liverpool; Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (1836)

The collection can trace its roots to Henry Brougham, who helped found University College London in the 1820s. He was a firm believer that knowledge should be available to all, not just the wealthy. He launched the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (SDUK) in 1826 to share affordable educational publications across a rapidly industrialising Britain. One of the most popular and influential of the society’s prodigious outputs was a subscription atlas that became one of the most successful series of maps ever published. By 1848, they had printed more than three million accurate and affordable maps of cities around the world, such as this one depicting Liverpool in 1936.

General Sketch of the Physical and Geological Features of India; G.B. Greenough (1854)

Throughout the 19^th Century (and for much of the 20^th), Britain benefited immensely from the natural resources of its empire and relied on maps to exploit it. George Bellas Greenough, a contemporary of Darwin who is relatively unknown today, had close links to many of the founders of UCL and bequeathed his fossil collection to the UCL (and his maps and papers to some of Britain’s learned societies). He created the first geological map of the Indian Subcontinent, which was printed in relatively small numbers in 1855, the year of his death. Only thirty or so copies are known to have survived, but Cheshire discovered another, which had seen better days, crammed into the drawer marked “India”.

New Survey of London Life and Labour (1928)

The UCL Map Library is home to a few maps rescued from the closure of other university collections. Here are hand-coloured sheets from the New Survey of London Life and Labour undertaken in the 1920s as a follow-up to Charle’s Booth’s famous poverty survey of the city at the end of the 19^th Century. They detail Greenwich and are part of the Isle of Dogs and are a tiny element of a vast map that covered all of London. The colours depict the perceived class of the residents of each street, ranging from the colour black denoting “the lowest class” to red plotting the residences of “the wealthy.”

Luftgeographisches Einzelheft Großbritannien Band 1: Süd- und Ostengland; Generalstab 7. Abteilung (c. 1940)

This understated map was put to terrifying use by the German Airforce (Luftwaffe) during the Blitz. It folds out of a navigational handbook – that was captured at the end of the Second World War – to direct bombers to their targets across southern England. In addition to the map, there are aerial photographs of key landmarks and settlements so the pilots could orientate themselves as they flew over them. Following the war, allied forces recovered as many maps as they could from the axis powers, sending back to the UK for further analysis, which academics at UCL contributed to.

Percent of Households Without Access to a Hot Water Tap; National Computer Centre (1971)

Researchers at UCL were pioneers of the electronic mapping that has ultimately come to replace the paper maps, and the map library stores many of the first atlases to be made on computers. For example, this is a sheet from an atlas that was created in 1971 by Kenneth Rosing and Peter Wood and uses some pioneering software called SYMAP. In contrast to its high-tech production for the time, its topic is the “Percentage of households without access to a hot water tap” in the West-Midlands (UK) from the 1966 Census.

Image

Photo Credit: Peter Searle

Media Contact

Michael Lucibella

E: michael.lucibella@ucl.ac.uk