The oldest map currently included on these pages is the 1793 Enclosure Award map of Harby, Leicestershire. The original [reference: MA/EN/A/136/1] is held at the Record Office for Leicestershire, Leicester and Rutland: https://www.recordoffice.org.uk/

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The historic Ordnance Survey maps come from the excellent National Library of Scotland (NLS) maps website (https://maps.nls.uk/). Their re-use is allowed under a under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) licence provided that we acknowledge where they come from. Some of the techniques we use to display the maps (the overlay viewer and side-by-side viewer) have been adapted from those on the NLS website and also from code on https://github.com/NationalLibraryOfScotland.

 

Here is some more detail about the Ordnance Survey maps used. Click on the underlined links to open individual sheets (including legends) in a new tab:

1884 Map

Leicestershire Sheet VII.SW, six-inches to the mile, Surveyed in 1883, Published in 1884

Also available at 25 inches to the mile scale as Sheet VII.9

1904 Map

Leicestershire Sheet VII.9, 25 inches to the mile, Revised 1902, Published 1904. The six-inches to a mile version of this mapping (Leicestershire Sheet VII.SW) is included as an option for the base map with the lidar viewer. It contains less detail than the 25-inch version, but extends over the area covered by the lidar data without any gaps.

1930 Map

Leicestershire Sheet VII.9, 25 inches to the mile, Revised 1928, Published 1930

1956 Map

1:10560 scale (six-inches to the mile) sheets SK73SW and SK73SE, Revised 1950, Published 1956

1972 Map

1:2500 scale map sheets SK7430-7530 and SK7431-7531, Revised 1971, Published 1972

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The 1884, 1904, 1952 and 1972 maps are displayed as tiled layers, and with these you can pan away from Harby and view other parts of Leicestershire (in the case of the 1884 and 1904 maps),  parts of the Midlands (with the 1972 map) and the whole country (with the six-inch version of the 1904 map and the1952 map). Away from Harby the maps in a particular layer will be of a similar vintage to the Harby one but not necessarily an identical publication date.

 

The LIDAR data used in the viewers were acquired by the Environment Agency as part of a national mapping programme (© Environment Agency copyright and/or database right 2022. All rights reserved.) LIDAR is an acronym for LIght Detection And Ranging, a surveying method in which the ground surface is scanned in detail using pulses of laser light. The model shown is the ‘last arrival’ or Digital Surface Model (DSM), which includes buildings and vegetation where the laser light cannot penetrate to the ground surface. The data were acquired in 2018 (on the west side of the village) and 2019 (on the east side) and are made publicly available through an Open Government Licence. The overlay viewer and side-by-side viewers include a pre-generated shaded-relief image in which elevation differences in the surface model are exaggerated by a factor of 10 and the result illuminated from the north. The lidar viewer uses a different approach, in which elevations from the DSM are imaged in real time using parameters set by the user.

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