Anglo Saxon London, mapped

Anglo Saxon London Map

A map by Matt Brown at Londonist: In 2011, we put together a map showing the London area in Anglo Saxon times (roughly speaking, 500－1066AD). It’s pieced together from many resources, showing our guess at the roads, rivers, forests and marshland that characterised the region.

The main purpose was to highlight the many villages, hamlets and farmsteads whose names are still part of modern London. For example, the map shows ‘Wemba Lea’, the land belonging to a local chieftain by the name of Wemba. We know nothing about Mr Wemba, yet his name is familiar to millions, perhaps billions, through its continuation into our own times as Wembley. Similarly, Croydon is a corruption of Crog Dene, which meant something like ‘valley of the crocuses’.

Central London was once largely marshland. The first major Anglo Saxon settlement was Lundenwic (now Covent Garden/Aldwych). Later, King Alfred re-established a town within the old Roman walls, known as Lundenburh.

North-west London, with the ‘nose-shaped hill’ (Neasdun), Wemba Lea and the curling River Brent, which still flows through the area.

See also

• Seminal William ‘Strata’ Smith geology map rediscovered — …acknowledged as the first geological map of a country ever produced. ⋮ Smith spent the better part of 15 years collecting the information needed to compile the map. It is said he covered about 10,000 miles a year on foot, on horse and in carriage, cataloguing the locations of all the formations that make up the geology of the three home nations.
• Recovering The Doves Type from the bottom of the Thames — In 1916, the Doves Type was seemingly lost forever after it was thrown into the River Thames.
• Distribution of the slave population of the southern United States, 1860 — Based on data from the 1860 census, this map was the Census Office’s first attempt to map population density.