The Mogg family was one of the leading firms specialising in London maps and guide books. The business was established by Edward Mogg (1769-1861), who was apprenticed to one of the greatest map engravers of the period, Samuel John Neele, on 14th September, 1785. He started publishing under his own imprint in 1804; the business was continued by his sons Edward Slatford (1805-1849) and William sr. (b. 1810; fl.1841-1882).
The family published a huge number of maps and guide books over the years, focussed on the growing ability (and propensity) for people to travel. They also produced many important maps and street-guides of London, and of its environs.
This map, ‘Modern London’, covering a region from north to south from Stoke Newington to Wandsworth, Clapham Common and Lewisham; and from west to east from Willesden Green, Hammersmith and Barnes Common to Greenwich, the East India Docks and Stratford, an area broadly three miles radius from the General Post Office.
As a snapshot of London at the middle of the nineteenth century, it is remarkable how many areas now in London were then shown as peripheral villages, notably Chelsea, Notting Hill, Kilburn, Hampstead, Stratford, Greenwich, Camberwell and Battersea.
This is one of the most popular of their plans of London, first published in 1845, and re-issued regularly thereafter, as London, and most particularly the railway network into the metropolis, expanded at a rapid rate. For this printing, Edward Slatford Mogg shows the South Western Railway extended from Nine Elms to Waterloo Station, which it is not yet named, with extensions towards Charing Cross. The cover title is now dated 1849. Despite being much reprinted, individual issues are very scarce. Howgego records only two institutional examples of the map but, in his description, does not list the printed title used on the cover label of this example.
Howgego, Printed Maps Of London, 390, (3): noting two institutional locations, not recording this version of the cover title.
