One of HTT’s principal aims is to encourage the better understanding of urban form and history through comparative study, and our publications facilitate this. Our folding maps and the main maps in our atlases are all at the same Ordnance Survey scale, 1:2500, and use a similar set of cartographic conventions, so one can easily be set alongside others. Every town displays a mixture of planned and organic growth, and there are many common features. It’s easily possible to pick out ‘High Street’ on a number of different maps and observe similar patterns of properties and the layout of plots, or to examine the influence of fortifications on the shape and circulation of the town.
The plan of Canterbury High Street, for example, shows the ‘burgage plots’ typical of many medieval towns: narrow plots of land, individually owned and developed, running back from the frontage to the main street. Along the main street were houses, two or more stories high, commonly with gable-end to the street and shops at ground level.
Marketplaces are another interesting subject for comparison – size, shape, location, and evolution, including the interplay between infilling, as market stalls become rows of fixed shops, and clearing, as the same rows are removed to open up the marketplace. At Ripon, for example, a large marketplace laid out in the 12th and 13th centuries was gradually reduced in size by encroachments, so that effectively two marketplaces were formed. A market cross was erected by the end of the 13th century, and a Tollbooth stood nearby, but both were removed in the 17th century; rows of shops on the marketplace itself were removed in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Comparison can be a desk-top exercise, but it’s always instructive and enjoyable to do it on foot, in three dimensions – or four, if you count the time taken to perambulate. A new book by the architect Ptolemy Dean records just that. Streetscapes: Historic routes though English towns (Lund Humphries, 2024) traces his footsteps through 26 English towns, bringing together Ordnance Survey maps and a deep knowledge and appreciation of architectural history, to examine how historic townscapes work and what makes them attractive and liveable. The book is beautifully illustrated with Dean’s watercolour sketches, such as the cover image for this piece.