Magnificent Georgian folding wall map of Sussex based surveys by Gream, Gardner and Yeakell.
William Gardner and Thomas Yeakell’s famous wall map of Sussex has a long and troubled history. Initially conceived as a subscription scheme to finance an enormous wall of the county mapped to a scale of two inches to the mile on eight sheets over six years beginning in 1778, the two surveyors needed to sell four hundred subscriptions just to cover the costs. They only sold two hundred and fifty, leading to a collapse of the scheme with only four sheets published in 1783.

Yeakell died in 1787 but Gardner had developed a relationship with Charles Lennox, Duke of Richmond, who had just been made Master of Ordnance. The Duke invited Gardner to join the Ordnance as Chief Surveying Draftsman. This gave him access to William Mudge’s trigonometrical survey. This in turn encouraged Gardner to re-visit his unfinished map of Sussex and he entered into a new partnership with another surveyor, Thomas Gream to complete the project.

The finished map was smaller then planned on a scale of one inch to the mile. However, it was a trail blazer as it was the first map to use the new trigonometrical survey. It was engraved by Thomas Foot and published commercially by William Faden in 1795 to great acclaim. It won an award from the Society of Arts and acted as a template for future maps of this scale published by the Ordnance Survey and later commercial publishers such as the Greenwood brothers and Henry Teesdale.

The example offered here is the second state issued by William Faden in 1795. The first state is believed to have been a proof copy published in very small numbers and not commercially available. It is one single sheet, segmented on linen and in original colour. 

Folded. [SUSSEX641]