Have you ever seen London’s first A to Z? Thats what I often like to ask people. Then comes the inevitable question, do you know what I’m talking about, do you remember the A to Z? That dog-eared little book, crumpled, worn and forever in the bottom of a bag. It always seemed to survive, no matter the damage, even with pages tumbling and leaking from a cracked spine, usually at exactly the point you needed most?
Nobody under the age of thirty has the faintest idea what I’m talking about, of course. But back in the day, we all used to carry this little books around. Ask any Millennial or Gen Z for directions and they’ll produce a smart phone, google will connect to satellites in the inter-stellar void, and then with supreme smugness, this new technology will instruct them to turn left in 200 yards then right after the Matcha Latte shop, and off they go.
On this subject, do you remember sitting on a motorway siding in the back of a car on a Saturday afternoon, listening to your parents argue over the impossible directions from a road atlas map? Anyway I digress, as ever, all too easily.
I mention all of this because I’ve been spending rather a lot of time recently with what I call London’s very first original A to Z. It’s around four hundred and sixty years old, give or take, made originally of copper and wood-plate, and trust me, even now chances are you won’t get lost if you take a wrong turning. It’s known as the Agas map or the Civitas Londinum and it might just be the single most fascinating object or ‘thing’ I’ve come across in all my years of studying, reading and walking this city. Below is an image of the map in full. Its the city before the great fire devastated it, still very much existing within the turreted perimeter walls built by the Romans over a thousand years before. The original square mile and it is beyond fascinating.
As with many things in this fair and confusing country, however, its all a paradox. The map takes its name from Ralph Agas, a Tudor surveyor and map-maker, which is confusing as most historians now doubt he had anything to do with it. The trouble, and this is difficult to dispute, sits on the awkward fact that Agas was born right at the time the map is thought to have been drawn, which would make him, at the time of its creation, quite possibly the most talented child cartography of the Tudor period. A little rosy-cheeked prodigy sketching the City of London from his cradle. It’s a theory which does not survive close scrutiny, but the name Agas persists. Nobody is entirely sure who made it. And so we have a map, a glorious map, one of the most detailed and intriguing of its kind, attributed to the wrong man, and we’re still no closer to knowing who deserves the credit. Well never mind, typical London, so much history, its often hard to decipher fact from fiction.
What we do know is that it’s a woodcut copy, or rather, a copy of an earlier copy. A bootleg if you like. Engraved originally onto copper plate sometime before Elizabeth I ascended the throne in November 1558. And most excitingly for me, shortly before William Shakespeare, growing tired of rural anonymity, arrived in the capital in the early 1590’s with the idea of becoming ‘something’.
When you look upon the maze of streets and buildings in this map you are looking at London familiar to the greatest writer we ever had. That endlessly thrills me.
It is an astonishingly detailed record of the post-Medieval Tudor city, poised on the threshold of one of England’s most remarkable ages; the time of the playhouses, the Globe and the Rose, the defeat of the Armada, the exploration and circumnavigation of Drake. It was a moment in our history where the culture of our inward looking medieval world came to an abrupt end, giving way to the conniving and ambitious Tudors, the birth of naval power which sowed the seeds of an Empire that would come to dominate the globe for a hundred years. Memory for a nation is cemented in this age.
Here it all is laid out before you. An amazing archive of place and time. And how familiar it looks despite so much having changed. The glorious thing about the Agas map is that you don’t have to go somewhere to see it. It exists online in fabulous detail, with an array of interaction and rich information, the mind positively boggles. I need to warn you that it will destroy an afternoon or evening or two. In fact make a good cup of coffee or tea and get yourself comfortable. I’ll include the link at the bottom of the article.
When looking at the Agas map, the first thing that strikes you is how strange it feels compared to a modern conventionally ‘flat 2-D’ map. Buildings are drawn in surprising detail, but they tilt and rear upward in odd angles, as if the map maker had himself been elevated, roofs and gables lean and jut, city gates and church spires rise. You don’t read it, instead, with the knowledge of the modern capital, its easy to descend and let yourself wander through it.
It doesn’t take very long before you find yourself saying: “My goodness, I recognise all of this!”.
And yet saying that, the Agas Paradox comes in again, because it is a city which has been entirely lost. The narrow leaning timber buildings, forever edged into our memory: this is London before the Fire. It’s a ghost, a dead city. It is no longer there – or is it. The massive Gothic cathedral of St Paul’s still stands, dominating Ludgate Hill. Though by the time the map was drawn, and useful for dating, it had lost its great wooden spire, that had once made it the tallest building in Europe, having burnt down after a lightning strike in June 1561. A small portent, perhaps, for the far greater catastrophe still to come. The cathedral all Neo-Gothic and faintly like Salisbury, feels unfamiliar, there is no landmark dome, because Wren’s great rebuild wouldn’t happen for another century. Saying that neither is there a Millennium Bridge, a Tate Modern, a chain of Pret Coffee Shops – or for that matter, the expansive spread of the suburbs. Its at once uncannily recognisable, the roads and streets we know, and yet of course its so different. The Agas Paradox.
London Bridge isn’t the modern concrete construct, a road busy with buses, tourists and city workers; it’s a complex street packed with multi-storeyed houses and shops, supported on nineteen arches over the Thames. It’s the only bridge, and would remain so for another two hundred years. The river is alive with all sorts of craft, narrow rowing boats known as wherries, the Tudor version of the black cab or the uber, jostle alongside tilt boats, often powered by many oarsmen carrying well to do folk, then sail boats and barges carrying freight and goods.
South of the river in the surprisingly green looking, but already seedy borough of Southwark, there are bull and bear-baiting rings dotted alongside the taverns and brothels of Bankside. As you look you’ll notice neither the Rose Playhouse or the Globe Theatre are present yet.
One forgets as well, how for centuries the city lived compressed within the walls of the old Roman foundations. This is the original square mile. We forget how recently, within the last hundred years, the urban mass of the city grew beyond these walls, creating the enormous suburbs with which we are now familiar. North of the old defensive walls and the Roman Gates, most of which are sadly gone forever, a place now dominated by great steel and glass skyscrapers, the map shows us open fields and quaint country lanes. There are archery butts outside of Moorfields, people are walking their dogs, cattle graze by the side of Tower Hill, people are drying their washing in the grass by Smithfield.
Here’s the thing, though, and the reason I keep coming back to this map. After the Fire destroyed so much of the medieval City in 1666, plans were drawn to rebuild London differently, more in the fashion of the European capitals, wide boulevards, sweeping vistas. Sir Christopher Wren had a vision but it was rejected in terms of practicality. It would be too slow and too expensive for a city that needed to get back to business as quickly as possible. So London, as was its custom, was rebuilt largely on top of its own foundations and ruins, along the old roman and medieval streets. And so the ancient city remains to this day.
Which means an enormous amount of what you see on the Agas map, the length of Cheapside and its passages and lanes, the tangle of streets around Guildhall and the Exchange, the line of Cornhill, the old markets, the sweep of Bishopsgate, its all still walkable today. Not in spirit, but actually, physically walkable, on the very same ground, be it a few meters higher.
Nothing standing would be recognisable to a Tudor Londoner. But the ground itself would be. The road, the lane, the alley, all still there, still running exactly where it always ran.
That’s the thing about the A-Z , or google maps on your phone: they are remarkably good at getting you from A to B, or A to Z, but remarkably bad at telling you that you’re walking through thousands of years of history to do it.
The Agas map does the opposite. It’s hopeless for finding the nearest coffee shop or a public convenience. But it will stop you dead in the street the moment you realise you’re walking down a lane that was old before the Tudors ever set foot on it, a lane the Romans laid down and paved, and generation after generation simply never thought to move. And its still here, you are walking on it.
Falling down and deep into the rabbit hole
If you want to lose an entire afternoon — and I mean properly lose it, put-the-kettle-on-three-times-and-forget-to-drink-any-of-it lose it — the Map of Early Modern London project (MoEML) has digitised the whole thing. It’s fully zoomable, fully clickable, with scholarly notes tucked behind almost every building and lane. You start off meaning to check one small detail near St Paul’s and resurface two hours later somewhere down in Southwark, having read all about bear-baiting licences and forgotten entirely why you opened the thing in the first place. Consider yourself warned. It is an absolute wormhole, in the very best sense, and I’d recommend falling into it at least once.
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