Although Richard Gough, president of the Society of Antiquaries 1771–91, is well known for his campaigns to record British antiquities, his interests were not confined to ancient survivals. Town, the second selection to be published from his collections now in the Bodleian Library (following London, Nurse Reference Nurse2000), reveals a broad-ranging fascination with the appearance of Britain during his lifetime. Each of the 110 illustrations is accompanied by an explanatory text, with references to relevant works listed in an extensive bibliography at the end, making this book an enlightening starting point for anyone interested in the character and variety of eighteenth-century Britain or in the individual places illustrated. It is a benign picture of national and local pride – no highwaymen, no urban or rural poverty, although some disasters are recorded; a map of 1731 shows the extent of the great fire at Blandford Forum, Dorset, and a startling view, dedicated to Richard Gough, depicts Hereford Cathedral behind a jagged pile of fallen masonry, ‘taken the day after’ the collapse of the west tower in 1786.

Between 1756–71 Gough travelled widely, not only all over England, but also to Scotland and around Wales. Revealing excerpts from his lively letters and journals are provided in an appendix, including an adventurous climb up Snowdon in 1770. His tours, he claimed, compensated for the fact that his mother would not allow him to travel abroad, so his interests developed rather differently from those of his contemporaries who undertook the Grand Tour. From the huge collections of maps, prints, drawings and watercolours, which Gough continued to add to up to two years before his death in 1809, Bernard Nurse has chosen a selection illustrating both the changing state of British towns and cities and the development of mapmaking and topographical recording. While most date from the second half of the eighteenth century, older examples include early seventeenth-century maps by John Speed, demonstrating Gough’s appreciation of the value of maps as historical records, and several early eighteenth-century drawings by William Stukeley, among them his rough draft of 1720 for the map of Verulamium published by the Antiquaries. The very earliest map to be recorded is Gough’s own sketch of the British Isles, as shown on the thirteenth-century Mappa Mundi at Hereford Cathedral.

Gough collected many of the town maps produced by the more sophisticated surveying of the second half of the eighteenth century. They demonstrate how towns in the Midlands and the north were expanding faster than those in the south and east. Civic pride is expressed by views of principal buildings in the margins, titles are presented in elaborate cartouches, some with tiny revealing details, as at Wolverhampton, showing local industry (wooden staves and knives). On the northern fringes of Birmingham, surveyed in 1750, plots are titled ‘land for building’, and the Bucks’ 1753 prospect of the town includes some smoking chimneys. A view of Exeter shows the extensive tenter ground of the well-established cloth trade, but most industry at this time was still on a small scale; many of the town maps have rural fringes with detailed depiction of gardens, orchards and agricultural land. Contrasts between town and country, antiquity and the present, are demonstrated in a fascinating sequence on Bath: excavation of Romans remains, a view of the Baths and fashionable Pump Room, the grand Prior Park seen beyond the ingenious wooden railway bringing stone from the quarries, and sheep grazing in front of the Royal Crescent under construction in 1773. Major building was also taking place in Scotland, a map of 1787 shows the striking contrasts in layout to be seen in ‘the City of Edinburgh Old and New with the late extended improvements’.

Contemporary pictorial records also celebrated engineering achievements: the mid-century coastal fortifications at Chatham and Portsmouth built in response to the war with France, new docks and harbours at Liverpool and Greenock for Atlantic trade and shipbuilding, new bridges at Exeter, Newcastle and, most recently, Sunderland, 1796, notable for its wide single span.

The views are frequently enlivened attractively by a variety of figures engaged in agriculture or hunting, promenading at the spas of Tunbridge Wells (in a bird’s eye view of 1719) or partaking in sea bathing, newly fashionable in the later eighteenth century, at Margate, Ramsgate and Scarborough. There is a panoramic view of the Newmarket Horse Race (c 1723), while Gough’s interest in the tradition of more formal historic ceremonies is demonstrated by prints of 1769 recording a funeral procession and an opening of Parliament in Edinburgh in the 1680s.

The excellent quality of reproduction of the illustrations, and an attractive layout makes this informative collection a pleasure to study.