Background

The Ordnance Survey ‘Seventh Series’ provides an excellent overview of the landscape of Great Britain in the 1950s. It was the only standard one-inch to the mile (1:63,360) uniform series to cover the whole of Great Britain, and for Ordnance Survey, it represented the final flowering of their one-inch map before its replacement in the 1970s by 1:50,000 scale mapping.

The one-inch to the mile map was a standard topographic authority and included a wide range of information on the physical and human landscape: land-use, industry, quarries, farms, inns and pubs, roads, railways, canals, parks and gardens, relief, and woodland. The one-inch series had military and civilian purposes behind it, and was of value too for official, administrative, scientific and recreational users. 

According to an OS circular of 1909, it was intended as a 'touring, cycling and small-scale manoeuvre map, [with] the primary object being that the average man should be able to find his way about unfamiliar country with ease' (quoted in Oliver (2005, p.47)). Essentially the one-inch was a general map, supplementing the main record of landscape change at the larger basic six-inch and 25-inch to the mile scales, so that minor changes may not appear even on full revision. 

The one-inch maps were of course considerably generalised compared to the six-inch maps, and necessarily selective, particularly regarding urban detail, buildings, towns and place-names. But by giving coverage of a wider area than the basic larger scales, the series is particularly useful in showing an overview of significant landscape features such as urban areas, roads and railways, and patterns of woods, orchards and formal parkland, as well as areas of rough pasture ground. 

The ‘Seventh Series’ maps depicted a number of distinctive categories of information:

  • more categories of road were shown than on the New Popular, including motorways, trunk roads, class 1 and class 2 main roads, minor roads, and untarred / unmetalled roads.
  • more categories of railway were shown than on the New Popular, including multiple track, single track and narrow gauge railways.
  • contours were shown at 50 foot intervals in brown, along with spot heights in feet above mean sea level. From 1953, spot heights were distinguished between more accurate heights surveyed by levelling, and those which has not.
  • National, county and parish boundaries were shown with different styles of black line.
  • footpaths and tracks were shown with a black dashed line. From 1960, some sheets started to also include public rights of way (shown in red) from the growing local authority Definitive Maps of Public Rights of Way.
  • antiquities were initially distinguished by font style into pre-Roman, Roman, and post-Roman antiquities; this was simplified to just Roman and other from 1958.
  • significant visible buildings such as churches, towers, aerials, windmills, and lighthouses were included, as on earlier one-inch maps, as well as the location of post offices and telephone boxes.