The Historic Towns Trust was established in 1965 as part of the International Commission for European Towns with the aim of providing historical maps of British towns. The British Committee of Historic Towns was originally chaired by Dr W. A. Pantin and the general editor of the volumes was Mrs M. D. Lobel. The first volume, comprising maps of Banbury, Caernarvon, Glasgow, Gloucester, Hereford, Nottingham and Salisbury was published in 1969 and the second comprising Bristol, Cambridge, Coventry and Norwich in 1975. The third volume, which provided maps of London in the period up to 1520, was published in 1989 and the fourth volume, on Windsor and Eton, in 2015. Future publications will cover York (2015), Winchester (2016) and Oxford (2017).

The creation of these atlases was the work of many different authors and entailed much correspondence and exchanges of information, some of which is preserved in the archive. Many draft maps were compiled before the final versions were agreed and published. The cartographic publishing firm of Lovell Johns, set up by Colonel Henry Johns, who was the topographical mapping editor of the historic maps in the first three volumes, has deposited many of these early draft maps (the bulk of them relating to London) in this archive. These draft maps demonstrate Colonel Johns’ remarkable mapping techniques. The cartographic techniques used for the first three volumes have now been superseded by digital technology and will be of interest to the historian of cartographic production.

The archive also contains the formal minutes of the meetings of the Trust and its subordinate committees.

Rob Petre, October 2015