{"id":636,"date":"2011-10-12T15:22:00","date_gmt":"2011-10-12T15:22:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mappinglondon.blogweb.casa.ucl.ac.uk\/?p=636"},"modified":"2014-10-06T12:01:33","modified_gmt":"2014-10-06T11:01:33","slug":"soviet-military-maps-of-london","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mappinglondon.co.uk\/2011\/soviet-military-maps-of-london\/","title":{"rendered":"Soviet Military Maps of London"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Yes the U.S.S.R. had its own maps of London, and other British cities, produced during Cold War era, i.e. the 1950s-1980s, to be perhaps used either for identifying targets to attack for a future UK invasion, or for logistics and management of the realm immediately after a successful offensive. The maps were compiled under great secrecy but have come to light in eastern Europe, and are now catalogued by a number of websites, first and foremost John Davies’ sovietmaps.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The above extract, of part of Hackney Marshes and Leyton in north-east London, is from a 1:25000 map produced in 1985, and is downloadable as an example map<\/a> from John’s website. Below shows Homerton and Victoria Park. The big text on the top-right corner is Russian Cyrillic for “Hackney Wick”. John writes:<\/p>\n

“Of interest, just to show the Soviet attention to detail, the map has two features not depicted on contemporary (1985) British mapping: tube stations are differentiated and marked with M (for metro), above-ground stations have the location of the station building indicated (for example Leyton Midland Road and Walthamstow Queens Road on what is now the Overground).<\/p>\n

“But there’s also a mistake. The River Lea is named in upper case letters (\u041b\u0418) just south of Lea Bridge Road. Name in capitals indicates a navigable river, but this isn’t – the nearby Lee Navigation is the navigable waterway. The blue arrow indicates direction of flow.”<\/i><\/p>\n

Fascinating!<\/p>\n

See also this followup post<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Thanks to John for permission to feature the extracts of the map that he sourced and scanned, here<\/i>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yes the U.S.S.R. had its own maps of London, and other British cities, produced during Cold War era, i.e. the 1950s-1980s, to be perhaps used<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":638,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[578,579,581,577,275,575,274,584,583,582,580,585],"class_list":["post-636","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-historic","tag-578","tag-hackney","tag-lea","tag-leyton","tag-military","tag-russian","tag-soviet","tag-spies","tag-spy","tag-ussr","tag-victoria-park","tag-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mappinglondon.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/636","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mappinglondon.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mappinglondon.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mappinglondon.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mappinglondon.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=636"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mappinglondon.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/636\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2585,"href":"https:\/\/mappinglondon.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/636\/revisions\/2585"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mappinglondon.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/638"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mappinglondon.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=636"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mappinglondon.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=636"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mappinglondon.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=636"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}