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Abstract
Very little is known about the work or life of the 19th-century cartographer John Wood. He is generally thought to have worked principally on producing plans of Scottish towns, but this research has now identified some 150 of his plans covering towns across much of England and Wales as well as Scotland. It throws new light on his life and on the comprehensive hands-on nature of his involvement with all the stages of producing this astounding output. His cartographic achievement warrants his being far more widely recognized in the annals of British cartography.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I owe warm debts of gratitude to many who have helped me explore unfamiliar territory. Ralph Hyde let me look through his notes from work he did on Wood in the 1980s; Chris Fleet opened up the treasures of the NLS, guided me to new leads and provided new digitized plans of the Stornoway MS; Margaret Wilkes helped with access to RSGS material; Martin Ebdon gave me details of his catalogue of Wood’s plans in south-west England. Roger Kain and Richard Oliver let me access their catalogue of urban plans; John Moore and Chris Perkins offered helpful cartographic advice; and the archivists and staff of numerous record offices around Britain were invariably helpful, interested and enthusiastic. My wife Glenna brought an invaluable historian’s eye to help with some of the explorations in record offices. To all of them I am most grateful and hope that I have done justice to their assistance by adding some flesh to the bones of Wood.
Notes
i Wood only employed elaborate calligraphy in some of the dedications to patrons; an example being to the Duke of Northumberland on the Alnwick plan ().
ii Hyde assembled valuable details of some previously unknown Wood’s plans.
iii She was baptised on 23rd June 1782, daughter of James Morris, schoolteacher in Mains of Cargill.
iv Moir (1983) mistakenly calls her ‘Norris’ which is a curious slip. However subsequent references have copied his mistake.
v The handsome house still stands on Newbattle Terrace. Its grounds are now home to the Falcon Tennis Club, with courts and a bowling green in the extensive land behind the house. The basement of the house is used by the Club, while the remainder is a private residence.
vi Plots had annual land-rent feus. The Mosmans later lived at Auchtyfardle. William is described as ‘merchant of Newcastle and heir of Cailzie’.
vii National Archives of Scotland, in the cartulary of the Canaan Estate.
viii This suggests that Canaan Grove had already been built between 1803 and 1813.
ix This organization remains as shadowy as Wood himself. It appears not to be a London-based society since it is not mentioned by Thompson (1968), but was probably an informal group of Scottish surveyors who met annually (Moore, pers. comm.).
x Bendall (1997) suggests that Calvert trained Wood up to 1811.
xi ‘Sketch of the Estate of Hunthill, in the Parish of Jedburgh and County of Roxburgh made by John Wood from John Easton’s survey 1812’. The plan includes new woodlands planted up to 1814.
xii The dates shown on Wood’s maps are assumed to be the year in which the survey was undertaken. It is possible that they may refer to the date of engraving or of publication.
xiii A slightly revised version, together with its inset plan of the town, was later used by Thompson in his Atlas of Scotland. Thompson used Wood as one of his adjudicators to validate the accuracy of the Dumbartonshire map (Williams and Fleet, 2008).
xiv Moir listed Northampton twice. The 1835 and 1847 plans of Northampton were by W. W. Law, copied, with acknowledgement, from an 1830 manuscript plan by Wood. Hence the tally above includes only a single Northampton plan by Wood.
xvi Each of the copyright libraries has at most a mere handful of Wood’s plans of towns south of the border: the National Library of Scotland has only two; the British Library, Cambridge University Library and Bodleian each have the Scottish ‘atlas’ but only a handful of plans of English or Welsh towns; the National Library of Wales has the largest collection with eight plans of Welsh towns and two English towns. The Royal Geographical Society has only a single English plan. The Kew National Archives has 12 Wood plans in its material for the 1832 Reform Act; and the Post Office Museum has 16 plans of Wood’s towns in England and Wales. Most plans of places in England and Wales are only found as isolated items scattered across county archive and record offices. Graham, for example, knew of only two copies of the Newcastle plan despite his intensive knowledge of material for north-east England. Martin Ebdon, who has made intensive explorations of Wood’s plans in the South West, knows of only single copies of most plans of the region’s towns. Even for Barnstaple, Bideford and Great Torrington, on which he has focused, he has unearthed at most only three or four copies of each (pers. comm.). Some record offices have produced reproductions and facsimiles of Wood’s English plans, but invariably only covering one or two local towns.
xvii The reference to Daniel White is consistent with the relevant entry in Pigot’s 1834 Directory of Durham. The reference to ‘John Wood’ may well refer to Wood given his connections with the area of Durham and North Yorkshire.
xviii Threadneedle Street presents a puzzle. It first appears in 1830 on a plan (and in a letter written by Wood to Lord Melville), and then on plans in 1839, 1840 and 1841. Except for Canaan, no other address appears over so lengthy a period. He did no surveys close to London and had he needed a postal address could have used Canaan. The 1841 Post Office London Directory shows that most properties in Threadneedle Street by then were businesses. However, number 53 housed a stockbrokers, a bullion broker, and, intriguingly, ‘Petty, Wood and Tomlin’ (a ‘grocers etc.’). It is feasible that the Wood may have been John’s elder brother. However, why John used the address is unclear.
xix Hence only Margaret Wood appears at Canaan Grove in the 1841 census. This – the first census by enumerators – was held in June. All later censuses have been held in March/April to avoid the harvest and holiday period. Wood’s absence from Edinburgh is therefore understandable since June would have been in the middle of his surveying season.
xx Todd’s premises appear in Baines’s Directory of 1823 as ‘Christopher and Joseph Todd (printers) Long room street’, but with no suggestion of the address being lodgings as well as bookseller. Long room St is now St.Nicholas St running north from the Grand Hotel.
xxi In Carlisle, in September 1820, Wood advertised in the Carlisle Patriot ‘to solicit the attention of the nobility and gentry and the public to his ground plan of Carlisle now making’. He stayed at Cooper’s Lodgings at Botchergate which was the address at which potential employers could place commissions for him to undertake estate plans. By September 1821, having left the city, he advertised that ‘his plan of Carlisle was to be seen at the shop of B Scott and at other booksellers’.
xxii Held in the National Library of Scotland (see illustration in Robson, ‘John Wood 2’).
xxiii The plan is discussed by Moore (1996).
xxiv The plan of the town shares many characteristics of Wood’s work; the insets of the environs and the proposed harbour and naval yard do not. Interestingly, the engraving was done by George Bartholomew in 1826, the year in which he effectively started his cartographic career.
xxv Coulter’s (1996) detailed study of the Aberdeen plan led him to conclude that some areas had been copied en masse from the earlier Smith plan, but that areas of the new city appear to be Wood’s own work.
xxvi Hyde suggests that both plans were by W. & A. K. Johnston. Dundee is entitled ‘Surveyed 1821’ but is noted as lithographed by the Edinburgh firm of Ballantine in 1827; Paisley was lithographed by Ballantine’s in 1828. Both are at a much smaller scale than the typical Wood plan; Paisley is crudely sketched and lacks any references to specific buildings or names of owner or residents; Dundee is more accurate and includes some references to particular buildings.
xxvii Wood acknowledged that his Duns plan was based on a survey by Blackadder (probably the surveyor noted by Bendall (1997)). The one English plan which he acknowledges as derived from another surveyor is of Ulverston: 'Drawn and published by John Wood land surveyor Northallerton from a survey by Mr Stanwix’. Details of Jonathan Stanwix are in Bendall (1997).
xxviii ‘Plan of Sunderland, Bishopwearmouth and Mk.Wearmouth, 1817’ by T. Robson.
xxix Middlebrook, 1950; Wilkes and Dodds, 1964; Bean, 1971. Mackenzie (1827, p.197) said that the medieval town ‘…had been built in a most awkward, crowded and inconvenient manner’.
xxx Mackenzie (1827) outlines the ‘Improvements effected or projected’ (pp.197-203) in great detail and indeed adds planning suggestions of his own.
xxxi The plan that he included was a reduced version of the large 1831 plan.
xxxii The comprehensive coverage of names is well illustrated by the Dumfriesshire & Galloway Natural History & Antiquarian Society website which lists the names recorded by Wood and the names in Pigot’s Directory for 1825–1826. There is considerable (although far from perfect) overlap between the two, and the overall numbers are not dissimilar.
xxxiii Only at the end of the 1830s did he use the Birmingham-based engraver Thomas Underwood (for Market Harborough and Weymouth) and the London-based engraver J. R. Jobbins (for Wellington).
xxxiv Thomas Nelson, born in Stirlingshire, had been apprenticed to a London bookseller in 1796–1798, but left at age 16 to open a second-hand bookshop in Edinburgh (Myers, 2007, p.405). He founded his firm in 1811 and added printing and publishing in 1825 (Howard-Hill, 2007, p.34). His sons joined the firm in 1835 and 1839 – to become Nelson & Sons. Nelson was highly entrepreneurial and his business grew rapidly. He established the ‘holy trinity’ of wide distribution, mass production, and low costs and was the first Edinburgh publisher to employ a bagman to sell round the country.
xxxv Brecon and Caernarvon in 1834 and West Bromwich in 1837.
xxxvi Worms and Baynton-Williams (2011) provide details of the earlier Thomas Brown (1764–1820) who (very much of his time) was variously bookseller, publisher, stationer and originally engraver. He acted as retailer for John Ainslie’s later maps and on his death was succeed by his apprentice and nephew William Swinton. He was presumably the father of the Thomas Brown who published and/or sold many of Wood’s plans.
xxxvii For example he advertised his plan of Ayr, saying that he proposed to publish a specimen and that subscription papers could be seen in the town at the Coffee Rooms, at Messrs Humphreys & Co, the offices of the Bank of Scotland and the offices of the Advertiser itself.
xxxviii Moir (1983, p.245) noted that five of the plans had dates erased. Margaret Wilkes has suggested that Wood may have had a formal commercial arrangement with Nelson (pers. comm..).
xxxix Examples include: Barnes, 1951; Conzen, 1969; Davies, 1840; Dodd, 1957; Russett, 1999; Torrens, 1987; Wanklyn, 1927; Waters, 1972; Welsford, 2010.
xl Robert Stevenson, Scottish engineer and designer who built the Bell Rock Lighthouse.
xli Robert Rawlinson, Report...on...the sanitary condition of...Alnwick and Canongate..., London HMSO, 1849.
xlii He is not mentioned by Delano-Smith and Kain (1999) in their history of English cartography even though they have a chapter on urban mapping. Baynton-Williams (1992) includes reproductions of four Wood plans of Welsh towns, but suggests that Wood only surveyed places in northern England and Wales and curiously, since Cargill is hardly close to Edinburgh, that ‘he based himself in Edinburgh, following his marriage to a local girl’. Bennett and Batten (2011, p.62) commenting on the plan of Exeter say baldly ‘Nothing is known about John Wood’.