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For those researching families who came from Edinburgh, a map is an invaluable tool. You can see where they lived, and find local places of interest, like schools, churches and cemeteries.
Modern maps of the city can be found at www.streetmap.co.uk and www.multimap.com and these allow you to zoom in and out, right down to street level. They can also take you straight to a specific address or postcode.
However the shape of a city changes over time, and if you have an address which was used a long time ago, it may have been redeveloped and you might not be able to find it on a modern map. Older maps are available, and the National Library of Scotland's Map Collection is the perfect place to start looking for Scottish maps. In particular, there are three sets of Ordnance Survey Town Plans for Edinburgh, from 1849 to 1894, and a large collection of plans by famous map-makers like Kirkwood, Lancefield and Bartholomew dating from 1580 to 1919.
These resources are extremely useful, but downloading and printing the maps is difficult - they are designed for browsing whilst you are on-line, and only small sections can be viewed at a time
The map shown below is the Post Office Plan for Edinburgh and Leith 1930-1931, by Bartholomew - the world-famous map publisher. The original map is quite large, at 50 inches x 40 inches, and I have scanned it and split it into nine sections for easier downloading. For the technically-minded, the map was scanned in 16 parts on a Umax Mirage IIse A3 flatbed scanner at 200dpi, and these were then stitched together to make one large map which was subsequently divided into the nine sections shown below. The individual sections are from 1.2MB to 3.6MB in size, and there is a small overlap of 100 pixels between adjacent sections.
Since map detail in the city centre can be difficult to make out, I have also made available a higher-resolution map of just this area. It extends from Stockbridge and Fettes Row in the north, to Newington and the Grange in the south; and from Donaldson's Hospital and Comely Bank Cemetery in the west, to Abbeyhill in the east. In this case, an A3-sized scan was made at 400dpi, and this was then divided into the two sections shown below. The individual sections are 4.5MB and 6.3MB in size, and there is a small overlap of 200 pixels between the sections.
There is also an extract which covers the St Leonards area, to the west of Holyrood Park. This area has been heavily re-developed since the 1960s, and many streets which used to exist here are no long shown on modern maps.
Copyright for non-Ordnance Survey maps is 70 years, which is why I chose to buy a copy of this particular map and make it available over the Internet. I am happy for you to download any or all of the sections for your own non-commercial purposes, and to display portions of the map on your own website. Scanning and stitching of the original map took quite a lot of time, so please do not re-publish all the sections on a website, nor any of the sections on a commercial website.
Please note that I am available to photograph locations in Edinburgh and the surrounding area - see my Photography page.
Map selection No 1 - Whole of Edinburgh
To view a section of the map, left-click on it, and it will open in a new window in your browser. To download a section without viewing it, right-click on the section, choose "Save Picture As", and find a location on your hard disk. The largest section, which covers the city centre and is 3.5MB in size, will take from about 15 seconds to download on a 2Mbps broadband connection, to nearly 9 minutes on a 56Kbps dial-up connection.
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Map selection No 2 - Edinburgh City Centre
To view a section of the map, left-click on it, and it will open in a new window in your browser. To download a section without viewing it, right-click on the section, choose "Save Picture As", and find a location on your hard disk. The larger section will take from about 30 seconds to download on a 2Mbps broadband connection, to 15 minutes on a 56kbps dial-up connection.
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Map selection No 3 - St Leonards
To view this map, left-click on it, and it will open in a new window in your browser. To download it without viewing it, right-click on the section, choose "Save Picture As", and find a location on your hard disk. It is 911KB in size, a small 366KB file, and will will take from about 4 seconds to download on a 2Mbps broadband connection, to about 130 seconds on a 56kbps dial-up connection.
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