A NEW AND ACCURATE SURVEY OF THE CITIES OF LONDON AND WESTMINSTER,
THE BOROUGH OF SOUTHWARK, WITH THE COUNTRY ABOUT IT FOR NINETEEN MILES IN LENGTH, AND THIRTEEN IN DEPTH
In which is contain’d an exact description of St. James’s, Kensington, Richmond, and Hampton Court Palaces, all the main cross-roads, lanes and paths, bye-ways, walls, pales, hedges, hills, vallies, rivers, bridges, ferries, brooks, ponds, woods, heaths, commons, parks, avenues, churches, houses, gardens, &c., 1751 and 1754.
Folio. pp. title, [2, index and subscriber’s list], double sheet general map [dated 1754], 16 double page maps making the whole.

There is no better visualisation of Georgian London than across John Rocque's atlas, it was a map which totally surpassed anything that preceded it and is one of the crowning achievements of 18th century cartography. Nearly every court, alley, timber yard and burial ground is shown; so too the market gardens and open fields that still nestled in at the edges of the expanding West End, and all through Hackney. It is a work of art in its own right, and one of the finest images ever recorded of the city.

John Rocque had made his name drawing gentlemen's gardens and in March 1738 decided that he would redeploy his skills to document London and its surroundings. He combined two methods: one a fairly unsophisticated ground survey by compass and measuring chain; and the other a totally pioneering application of the first modern theodolite, created and loaned by Jonathan Sisson, involving triangulation of sites from church spires. Following several years of endeavour it was discovered that the two sets of calculations clashed, throwing the maps off. The error necessitated his work be repeated, and by 1742 the scheme was very nearly abandoned. It was kept alive, however, by 246 subscribers who had put down a guinea apiece, with two more owing on delivery. Among them was Frederick, Prince of Wales, who would later make Rocque royal cartographer. What emerged was the first true bird's-eye view of London, and it remains the century's indispensable document.

That it exists at all is in many ways the perfect encapsulation of London as a city of opportunity. Rocque, a French Huguenot emigrant, had come to London to escape religious persecution in France, and enjoy Britain's more pluralistic tolerance. This was the Age of Enlightenment; Benjamin Franklin's pioneering work, Experiments and Observations on Electricity, 1751, and David Hume's An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, 1751, were both first published in London, at the same time as this edition of Rocque's map. This spirit of intellectual ambition sat alongside an explosion in national wealth, and the nascent growth of the Empire.