The Road from Chelmsford in Essex to St Edmonds-Bury in Suffolk & Saffron-Walden in Essex

London, 1698. Copper engraving, 32.5 x 43 cm, modern hand colour, blank verso; published as sheet 92 in the 1698 folio edition of Ogilby’s pioneering road atlas, the ‘Britannia’. Decorative cartouche featuring a shepherd and shepherdess and their flock. Thousands of miles of roads were surveyed for the project, smaller towns appeared in detail for the first time, and it was largely thanks to Ogilby’s influence that the Statute Mile was set at 1760 yards. However, Ogilby devised the project late in life. Ogilby’s modern biographer, Alan Ereira, explores Ogilby's earlier incarnations as a dancing master, soldier, spy, theatre impresario and translator, through which Ogilby survived the turbulent 17th century. Ereira also presents a provocative new reading of Ogilby's innovative and beautiful road atlas as a work of royalist propaganda - even expressed through the routes which he chose to include or emphasise. Map