Maps & road plans are great aren't they? So useful for telling you what was where at the time.
Yes...but some are more reliable than others as I've just been seeing on this from Philips' Handy Volume Atlas of London for Ilford for 1891.
So let's see what's wrong with it.
1/9
Let's start south of the High Road. Clements was sold in 1879 and by 1891 there were houses in Clements, Cleveland, Oakfield, Albert, and Scrafton Road in what had been Lot 11
But on this map those roads re nowhere to be seen and Clements is apparently still there!
2/9
Moving along the High Road, Queens Road is missing.
By the time of the 1891 Census, 32 houses were occupied. Building on them had begun very quickly after the Clements sale 12 years earlier.
3/9
A little to the east and what was called St Mary's Estate.
No cemetery - this was laid out in 1880/1.
No roads - these were laid out in the same period. The OS map is from a couple of years later but you get the picture.
4/9
But the oddest thing of all about this map is what can be seen north of the High Road in the Ilford Lodge Estate begun from 1882.
Again, the comparison is from a couple of years later but this time there are too many roads and houses!
5/9
Firstly the Sports Ground. We know that was there between 1886 where it was in the middle of fields, to 1904 where it was now surrounded by Coventry, Wellesley, Bathurst, and Melbourne Roads.
But on this 1891 map it has simply vanished. There is a patch of green...
6/9
...in the middle of a square but this never existed.
There are roads that weren't laid out until the auctions of remaining plots in 1896.
And one, Burns Road, that I've never heard of at all.
So what's going on here?
7/9
In 1892 the collapse of the Balfour Group and the Liberator Building Soc. brought work on the Ilford Lodge Estate to a halt.
When this map was being drawn, was the builder J.W.Hobbs consulted about how the Estate was going to progress and prospective roads drawn in?
8/9
What we have here, therefore, is a map that for part of it, looks back to the state of Ilford before the Clements sale in 1879; and possibly looking at how another part of it would look in future.
Result - nowhere near reliable enough for any research on the area in 1891
9/End
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