I would not have thought that Singapore would be big enough, or would have had enough history to be the subject of an historical atlas, but De Koninck, Drolet and Girard have managed to produce rather a good one in the midst of working on other projects. In fact it turns out not to be the first, since this is really an update of De Koninck's 1992 Singapore: An atlas of the revolution of territory.

The real attraction of this atlas is, of course, the beautifully produced maps, which begin by placing Singapore in a Southeast Asian and historical context, and then move straight on to show the changes to major features of Singapore's physical and social history. Through maps the reader can follow the history of urbanisation, ethnic and racial distribution of residency, industrialisation, the usually misnamed ‘land reclamation’ from the sea (labelled more correctly by these authors as ‘stretching the land’), public and private transport, airports and air routes, ports, water and nature reserves, community centres, churches, mosques and temples and burial places. There are even maps showing the global pattern of Singapore's international investments.

All of the maps are, of course, just the tip of much bigger stories, and these stories are told competently, but in the briefest outline, on the opposite page to the relevant maps. Most maps are set three to a page, with the bottom one being a 2005 map, and the two others being variously from the 1950s, 1960s, 1980s or 1990s. (There is not a single map from the 1970s for some reason, nor any from the 1930s or 1940s.)

The maps collectively tell a story of restless development and constant change, but perhaps it would be best if I described just a sample of the pages so the reader can form an idea of what this atlas contains. Page 25, for instance, is delightful. It compares the city in 1837 when Beach Road actually fronted onto the beach, with the city in 2005 when Beach Road is very far indeed from water's edge due to ‘stretching the land’. In a different spirit page 47 shows the how ‘stretching the land’ has resulted in joining up small islands in the Straits of Malacca and in the process dispossessing the indigenous Malay residents who have had to make way for power stations, oil refineries and petrochemical works. Page 67 shows the extraordinary expansion of Christian churches and Buddhist temples since 1958, along with the surprising decline and then partial resurgence of Taoist temples over the same period. The maps on pages 49 and 51 show development in Malaysia's South Johor Economic Region and Indonesia's Riau Archipelago — both rightfully in this book because both are by-products of Singapore's own economic development project.

The atlas does not engage in very critical analysis of the stories the maps are telling, but there is only one place – pages 70 and 71 on the expansion of the school system – where this becomes problematic. The text accompanying these maps makes a fundamental error of interpretation by telling the readers that there are now no ‘Chinese schools’ in Singapore. In fact there are more than two dozen Chinese schools, except the government does not like that label so they are called ‘Special Assistance Plan’ schools. This, however, is a minor quibble in an excellent and beautiful book that will be a boon to teachers and researchers.