Established in 1853, Stanfords has since made and supplied maps to royalty, the military, and famous adventurers, explorers, writers, and even dolls, for over 150 years.

Here we’ll be sharing some of the many fascinating stories in our rich history, as we discover more.

Cabinet War Rooms

Stanfords' maps played an important role in World War II – many of the maps used by Churchill and his administration in the Cabinet War Rooms in London’s Westminster were produced by Edward Stanford Ltd.

To this day, visitors to the museum of the rooms – preserved as they were left on the last day of the war – can see our map of south-east Asia on the wall of the Map Room. And there are many more – the museum curator lists no less than 28 maps published by Stanfords – all to be found in the map chests’ drawers. More...

Here at Stanfords, we're about to add another product to our range. In partnership with Cassini Publishing, we will shortly be offering Mapmaker-80 which provides site-centred historical maps of any part of England and Wales. These will match the 80x80cm format of the popular OS Select maps of the present-day landscape.

“We receive numerous requests for historical maps that match present-day OS Select maps,” says Stanfords' Martin Greenaway, “but previously this hasn’t been possible. Present-day OS maps are available in a set of seamless tiles, but until recently historical maps were not. Fortunately, Cassini has changed all that!” More...

Dr Peter Whitfield looks at the ghost story writer M R James and his connection with maps.

Mr Humphreys and His Inheritance

by M R James

Montagu Rhodes James (1862-1936) was a prolific British scholar, medievalist and palaeographer, who catalogued all the important manuscript collections in Cambridge, England. He became Provost of King’s College and then of Eton. He never married, but lived his entire life in the enclosed male realm of academic scholarship and college administration.

He also wrote some two dozen ghost stories which have carried his More...

It is a fascinating fact of cartographic history that the first world map to name the new continent of America was also the first to illustrate the existence of the Pacific Ocean. What's more, there is a mystery surrounding the origins of this remarkable map produced by Martin Waldseemuller in 1507: how did he come to represent the Pacific on his map a full decade before any European had actually seen the ocean?

Here we are honoured to reproduce an exclusive abridged version of a More...

ITMB Publishing Ltd (International Travel Maps and Books, if you're not in a hurry) was conceived in the early 1980s from the partnership of an Australian cartographer named Kevin Healey and Jack Joyce, a Canadian map retailer, who were both frustrated at the unimpressive range of maps of Central and South America on the market. At that time, European cartographic publishers apparently expressed little curiosity for that part of the world, as it wasn't perceived to be of sufficient interest to their market.

Fuelled by ambition, but with little in the way of resources, the dynamic duo planned to remedy the situation step-by-step, and began by self-publishing a two-sheet map of South America in 1985 with some support from the British publisher Bradt. As the struggle progressed More...