The sixth volume in the British Historic Towns Atlas series is the product of a collaboration between the Historic Towns Trust and the Winchester Excavations Committee. The result is a superb atlas that also offers a valuable contribution to the ongoing debate on the development of the atlas form in the digital age.

In 1955, in the aftermath of World War II, representatives from a number of European countries decided to create a set of historical atlases for European towns. To date, scholars have prepared maps for about 520 towns in 19 European countries. The Historic Towns Trust was established in 1957 to produce the atlases for British towns, and between 1969 and 1989 three volumes appeared. Recently the Historic Towns Trust has published a further three volumes: for Windsor, York and now Winchester. The Winchester volume, like those for Windsor and York, is stored in an A3 sized box, which opens to reveal a sheaf of loose maps, a book, a set of prints and a CD. In the Winchester volume, the main map, which the reader assembles from nine separate sheets, depicts the city c. 1800, but with an emphasis on historic buildings, and is drawn at 1:2500 scale. This map serves as the foundation for an additional 12 maps that represent Winchester, or sections of Winchester, at various earlier points in its history, and there are additional maps for the modern period. Although readers might be tempted to dive straight into the maps, they are best appreciated in conjunction with the book.

The book offers a series of short essays, written for a non-specialist audience, that sketch the history of Winchester at different phases in its history, from the prehistoric onwards. Part of the role of the essays is to offer accounts of the wealth of archaeological and documentary information for Winchester's development. Certain areas of the city have been subject to more archaeological investigation than others, and the documentary evidence also has strengths and weaknesses. The essays also explore the historical significance of the buildings, as places, whose spatial relationships are set out on the maps, and the history of the cathedral, the castle, the city's fortifications and its road network, are all particularly well discussed. The development of these structures, the essays make clear, was the product of struggles for power, authority and influence in Winchester, which involved groups from the Romans, the Vikings and the Normans to modern city planners. The book also contains a gazetteer, which offers information on selected places, and an extensive bibliography. The maps and book are complemented by a set of prints, which offer historic views that enable readers to visualize better the appearance of the city and its buildings in the past. The essays offer a good introduction to its history for those unfamiliar with Winchester. More significantly, the essays serve as a guide to the research that informed the maps’ creation, and therefore will be of interest to any user of the atlas.

Reviewers of the preceding Windsor and York atlases commented on the quality of the cartography of the printed maps, and the Winchester volume's cartography is similarly impressive. Like its predecessors, the Winchester volume also contains a CD that offers readers the essays, the gazetteer and most of the maps in a digital format. The CD may be a technology past its prime, but its inclusion acknowledges the increasing importance of digital approaches to urban scholarship, both in terms of how scholars access research and how they employ that research. Perhaps future volumes in the series will convey the digital material to readers in a different way, but regardless of the choice of media, the dual analogue and digital formats are helpful for researchers. Nonetheless, the existence of the digital version could tempt libraries to make the digital version widely available to users and then to restrict access to the printed volume, perhaps by locating it in their special collections. This would be a shame, since the Winchester atlas is best appreciated in person, with the maps spread out on a table and the book in hand. As long as libraries are collecting printed books, should they not acquire works that make full use of the potential of the printed medium? The printed atlas, with its spectacular maps, offer readers a compelling argument to visit a library in person, and it also offers all kinds of teachers a powerful tool for classroom instruction.