Database Guide - Historic Digimap

Historic Digimap is a useful resource for archaeologists, historians and geographers. As land use changes, the past is obscured and old maps can provide us with vital clues to where our ancestors lived and worked.

It provides access to the following historical Ordnance Survey maps of Great Britain

• All available County Series maps at 1:2,500 and 1:10,560 scales
• All available National grid maps (1943 to 1996) at 1:1,250, 1:2,500 and 1:10,560/10,000
• Selected Town Plan maps (1848 and 1939) at scales of 1:500, 1:528 and 1:1056

You can search for any location using postcodes, place names and National Grid References, or historical parish and county names; or latitude and longitude.

Some of the features of Historic Digimap are:

• You can compare two maps from different eras but of the same location to see changes in land use over time. e.g. when new housing is built, when a town is developed or when historical buildings fall into decline and disappear.
• You can print maps of areas in close up and include them in your assignments to provide visual examples to back up your argument.
• You can download maps to your computer for use in a Geographic Information System (GIS) or image processing software.

Read the National Library of Scotland’s guide to using maps as historical sources for a more detailed explanation of how to interpret the evidence.

• 1. Go to LibrarySearch 
     
     
  2. Log in using your CCCU username and password. If you are away from campus, or connecting with your own device over Wi-Fi, you will need to include @canterbury.ac.uk after your CCCU username.
     
     
  3. Select Find Databases A-Z, then click on H, finally click on the link to Historic Digimap to open it in a new tab.
     
     
  4. You will need to register with your university email addresss the first time you use this service.
     
     
  5. Historic Digimap is part of a larger data set called Digimap. Click on Historic and then choose Historic Roam to access the historic map collection.

The videos below explain how you can view the historic maps and download data for use in GIS software.

• Go to Historic Roam and type in the university’s postcode CT1 1QU
  
  
• The pink marker shows the site of the university. Click on + in the right hand menu bar to enlarge the area. What is the land use of the two areas adjoining the highlighted area?
  
  
• Click on the x to close the postcode drop down box. You can now see in the top strip that you can choose to view the maps by decade. The decades 1840s, 1850s, 1860s are greyed out. This means that Digimap does not have available maps for these decades.
  
  
• Historic Roam defaults to the earliest map, which in this case is the 1870s. You can see Havelock Street but North Holmes Road appears unmarked as a track or lane. You may be surprised to see that the Kent and Canterbury Hospital is next to St Augustine’s Monastery (now known as the Abbey) and not further out of town as it is now.
  
  
• Click on the 1900s tab and note that one end of North Holmes Road is now developed and marked as such.
  
  
• Now try the 1930s map. You can’t zoom in for a detailed look with this one but you can still see the site is an orchard with a malthouse.
  
  
• Look at the 1960s map. The word college appears, but there are no buildings on the site. The college was founded in 1962. However if you switch to the 1970s you will see a massive change as Canterbury Christ Church College has now been constructed on the site.
  
  
• Look at the contemporary map and you will see how the university has been developed since its early days as a teacher training college.
  
  
• Now type in your home postcode and find out when your house first appears on a map and how the area around it has changed over time.

The site has been tested with 200% browser zoom to ensure that text still renders correctly and legibly, without losing any of the site’s functionality or navigation. Most of the site’s functionality is fully accessible via keyboard and the material has been manually tested throughout using JAWS 18, NVDA 2018, Apple VoiceOver and Android Talkback.

Your Learning and Research Librarian will be able to help you make the best use of online resources. For detailed guidance, book a tutorial via the Learning Skills Hub.