The Road from York to Lancaster

London, 1698. Copper engraving, 35 x 44 cm, modern hand colour, a couple of trivial spots, blank verso; published as sheet 88 in the 1698 folio edition of Ogilby’s pioneering road atlas, the ‘Britannia’. The decorative cartouche shows finely dressed local gentry. 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