Leeds Central Library Saxton Atlas

Leeds Central Library will be showing an early atlas at the forthcoming heritage open days events.

Transcript

00:00 I'm Philip Wilde, I work at Leeds Central Library and today we're just going to have

00:05 a quick look at a very valuable item. We call it the Saxton Atlas, named after Christopher

00:13 Saxton. Christopher Saxton was a cartographer and he was a Leeds boy. And in 1574 he was

00:23 commissioned to do what was to become the very first comprehensive atlas of the counties

00:29 of England and Wales. And it took him five years to complete. He had the Queen Elizabeth

00:36 I, was basically his patron, and gave him permission to travel anywhere within her realm

00:44 and to be able to create this atlas. Here we've got a fabulous image of England, which

00:56 hopefully this will be on a closer display for you on the Heritage Open Day, which we

01:03 have here in the Library on the 9th of September I think it is. One of the very exciting things

01:10 that I always like about this is there are 35 maps in here, but the one that everybody

01:19 finds exciting of course is Christopher Saxton's map of Yorkshire. Which of course, because

01:26 Yorkshire is so big, it has to be double the size of even England and Wales. So it's a

01:32 fold-out map. And here, if we can see just very closely, we've got, this is done in 1577,

01:41 we've got places such as Barnsley there, Halifax there, and Bradford, and just close by Leeds.

01:49 With different spellings, because that's how they were at those times. It's a beautiful

01:56 map, and considering the fact that in those days they had no access to aerial photography,

02:03 and such like, no hot air balloons, the fact that Saxton produced this using only two instruments

02:10 and that was a pair of dividers and a rule, is absolutely stunning really. Here on the

02:18 coast you've got things, you've got Flamborough Head, Scarborough, Robin Hood's Bay, Whitby,

02:25 and of course it wouldn't be the same without a few sea monsters.