Horwoods Plan and Romantic London

 I forget how I stumbled on this, wikipedia maybe or some map aggregator. But in the late 1800s Horwood surveyed every building in London and published a full map containing every individual building in the city. 

It is truly a spectacular thing to behold. The level of detail is like nothing I've ever seen. I have spent hours staring at the exquisite detail and could likely spend many more.

Academic Matthew Sangster went through the laborious projecting of creating high-quality scans and compiling them in a publicly available version browsable here

 

The scans of Horwood's plan are only one of the many section of Sangster's site "Romantic London"

 The whole site in an engage and fascinating resource,One of my favorites is the list of city amenities:

"1 Cathedral
1 Abbey church
114 Parish churches
236 Chapels of different denominations
36 Different courts of justice
7 Courts of requests for the recovery of small debts
22 Hospitals for the sick, the lame, &c.
10 Dispensaries for the administration of medicine to the poor
93 Alms-houses
...
20 Principal tea gardens
480 Taverns
307 Inns
561 Coffee-houses
5989 Ale-houses
17 Prisons
1 General post, and upwards of 300 receiving houses
5 Principal offices for the penny post, and 348 receiving houses
1000 Hackney coaches
400 Sedan chairs
10,000 Boats and upwards
7,000 Streets, alleys, passages and courts
3 Stone bridges
150 Parishes, and 3 extra parishes
129,559 Houses
1,200,000 Inhabitants"

The wealth of detail, supplemented by a vast selection of historical drawings and prints really brings alive a metropolis on the cusp on industrialization. London's population would double within a few decades, the railways and canals would reshape the city, and not long after the underground would begin being built.

Sangster goes into detail on certain aspects, including a nuanced and thoughtful discussion of sex-work in relation to the historical publication "Harris's list of Covent Garden Ladies."

The site holds ample inspiration for mapmaking, worldbuilding, and TTRPGs more generally. I recommend it in the highest terms.