Giles' 40" Sewerage Plan of Lincoln (1849)

The Survey of Lincoln has added images of a mid-nineteenth century plan of much of the City of Lincoln onto this website. This plan has previously not been easily accessible and we hope that it will be of interest. The project to make the plan available and to indicate its significance has been driven by Dr Dennis Mills and Dr Rob Wheeler.

The map presented here is that drawn up in 1849 by the engineer George Giles, who had been commissioned to produce proposals for a Lincoln sewerage system. It is at 40 inches to the mile (1:1334). It is owned and currently [2015] held by City of Lincoln Council. Another version survives at the considerably reduced scale of 20 inches to the miles, which shows almost as much detail and is in far better condition.

The topographical base for both these maps was the 20-inch plan by JS Padley which had been produced in 1842 and would reappear in 1851 in a new edition. What Giles seems to have been given access to was Padley's revision material, based on the 1842 printing but showing some of the amendments which would be incorporated in 1851 and a couple which had changed yet again by the time the 1851 edition came out. It therefore provides a glimpse of an intermediate state between these two editions and allows one to date certain changes to before 1849 which otherwise might only have been datable to before 1851.

There are two problems in using it. The first is that a lot of street names and minor detail like garden paths were not copied, and this makes the map more difficult to follow. The second is that the clerk or clerks copying the map were erratic: at times they employed excessive generalisation; and by copying some buildings in not quite the right place, they found themselves having to squeeze detail into spaces it would not fit. Thus a difference between this map and Padley's printed 1842 map does not necessarily correspond to a real change on the ground. To confirm a suspected change, a comparison needs to be made with the Giles' 20-inch and with Padley's 1851 edition.

After the map had been copied, various street names were added in black ink. In some cases, this was done neatly by a clerk, in other cases a hastier, cursive, script was used. These include many names of courts and yards that are not on the Padley map (nor on the Giles' 20-inch). The names often appear in directories, but this is the only known cartographic record for many of them. Giles was interested in these courts and yards because they needed sewers. Thus, where there is some doubt as to which group of buildings a name refers to, the user should look for the sewers: groups of buildings like workshops that did not need sewers were of no interest.