Tag: Burdett

Mr Burdett, map maker and …

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Peter and Hannah

Peter Perez Burdett (c.1734-1793) is a fascinating example of an eighteenth-century artist, surveyor, amateur scientist and … serial debtor! His map of Derbyshire (1767) is the first accurate survey of the county, at the scale of an inch to a mile, and is invaluable to local historians. He was a friend of the painter Joseph Wright, whose portrait of Peter and his wife Hannah (1765) shows them al fresco, as if posing on their country estate. Apparently she was a widow, somewhat older than Peter, and the marriage may have helped him raise capital for his mapping project. He is holding his surveying telescope, while she appears most unsuitably dressed for a country ramble! (Wright was a master of drapery). This double portrait can now be seen at the Czech National Gallery in Prague.

Plan of Derby from Burdett’s map of 1767

Burdett appears in several of Wright’s paintings, notably as the figure making notes on the left in Wright’s masterpiece, A Philosopher Lecturing on the Orrery (see below). But despite their friendship and his map-making achievements, Burdett chose to move to Liverpool in 1768, possibly to seek a new range of clients, but certainly to evade his creditors. There he surveyed the Liverpool – Leeds canal, and was also involved in the development of the new technique of making aquatints in 1774, producing several himself, and thus demonstrating his versatility.

Burdett makes notes

However, Burdett seems to have been again less proficient at managing his finances, since in 1774 he had to flee to Baden, in modern Germany, to escape his debtors. Leaving Hannah behind he, curiously, took their joint portrait with him! In Baden he found a patron in the Grand Duke, and also found a new wife, Friederike Kotkowski, who he married in 1787 at the age of 53. They had a daughter, Anna, who married into the local aristocracy. Peter was clearly successful in his new milieu, surveying schemes for the Grand Duke until dying in 1793 at the age of 59. His story illustrates the extraordinary versatility of many men (and some women) in this period of rapid social change and scientific advances.

Using maps to research old roads

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Maps are an obvious choice in researching the road network of the past, but they have several limitations. There are no accurate maps of Derbyshire’s roads before the mid-eighteenth century, when Peter Burdett published his inch-to-a-mile map of the county in 1767 (see section above). We can assume that the road network presented by Burdett was essentially the same system that had operated since medieval times, but many minor roads and paths were not included.

Burdett marks the new turnpike roads with solid lines, and shows the milestones, while broken lines are reserved for less important roads. The map reveals many changes over the past 250 years: East Moor covered a much larger area, for example, while the centre of Matlock was focused on St Giles, rather than Crown Square as today. Some of the place names are unreliable, so Whatstandwell is written Hotstanddell – perhaps the surveyor misheard a local accent!

Burdett’s map was revised in 1791 to include new industrial sites such as coal mines and the Cromford canal, but the next large-scale map was Sanderson’s map of 1835, ‘Twenty miles around Mansfield’, which covers the eastern part of Derbyshire and shows field boundaries and many road names.

This section of the map, covering a similar area around Crich, shows the growth of enclosures in the early nineteenth century over East Moor, as well as displaying the road network in more detail. At a scale of two and a quarter inches to the mile it was the largest scale map so far produced, and so is more valuable in some areas than the Ordnance Survey one inch to the mile map of Derbyshire, first produced in 1840.

Clearly all such early maps have their drawbacks and omissions, but for road historians they provide an invaluable reference source, full of clues to the landscape of the past.