Dr Ann Saunders, MBE, FSA, and the London Topographical Society are to be congratulated on another excellent publication. Produced to their usual high standards, The A to Z of Charles II’s London 1682 provides the reader with a full facsimile of the sixteen sheets that make up William Morgan’s Survey of London. These have been overlaid with a grid, as in a modern A to Z, making it possible to locate quickly Adam & Eve Alley, Bermondsey Street, Southwark, Execution Dock, Wapping or Three Leg Alley, Fetter Lane. Morgan’s text round the map also helps the reader to identify the twenty-six wards, the ninety-seven parishes within the City walls, including those that had been reconfigured as a result of the Great Fire, and the extramural parishes in Westminster and Southwark.

The Survey is preceded by two introductory essays by Peter Barber, FSA, and Ralph Hyde, FSA. Barber draws out the complex political context in the period immediately after the Popish Plot (1678–9) within which Morgan’s work was produced. He argues that the illustrations of the king, queen and key buildings associated with royal authority, including Whitehall Palace, Somerset House and Westminster Hall, reveal that the Survey was produced to demonstrate the defeat of the Whigs. Hyde reveals how Morgan funded the venture and how he ensured that it would be successful by combining an accurate cartographic record of the post-Fire city and elaborate decoration. The Survey also provides evidence of the city’s expansion in the suburb of St James’s, to the north of Piccadilly, the area between the Haymarket and Hedge Lane, the district around Soho Square and to the south of the Strand. In addition the volume includes details of the illustrations that decorate the map and two indexes, the latter compiled by Robert Thompson, FSA. The first lists all streets and buildings engraved on the map, while the second records the ‘encouragers’ of the project, both private individuals and institutions, who gave money to support the production of the Survey.

For readers and researchers interested in the topography of late seventeenth-century London, the A to Z is invaluable. However, it is also worth noting that it is part of a larger sequence of London A to Zs published by the London Topographical Society and it is useful to list them in full: The A to Z of Elizabethan London, based on the ‘Agas’ map of the 1560s; The A to Z of Restoration London, based on Ogilby and Morgan’s map of 1679; The A to Z of Georgian London, based on Rocque’s map of 1747; The A to Z of Regency London, based on Horwood’s map of 1813; The A to Z of Victorian London, based on Bacon’s Atlas of 1813; and The A to Z of Edwardian London, based on Bacon’s Atlas of 1912. Whether you have a specific question about the location of a particular street, a wish to plot a ceremonial route or you just feel like becoming more acquainted with the streets of seventeenth-century London, London etc Actually Survey’d by William Morgan will ensure that you find what you are looking for.