A Layer of Late Victorian London: The Building Footprints from the 1:1,056 Ordnance Survey Map (1891–1896)

Remi Petitpierre; Isabella di Lenardo; Polly Hudson; Hendrik Herold; Katherine McDonough; Robert Hecht; Beatrice Vaienti; Christopher Fleet

doi:10.5334/johd.602

A Layer of Late Victorian London: The Building Footprints from the 1:1,056 Ordnance Survey Map (1891–1896)

Volume 12 (2026): Issue 1

By: Remi Petitpierre , Isabella di Lenardo , Polly Hudson , Hendrik Herold , Katherine McDonough , Robert Hecht , Beatrice Vaienti and Christopher Fleet

Open Access

|Aug 2026

Abstract

We release the historical geographic layer of individual building footprints for late Victorian London. This dataset results from the high-quality automatic extraction of the Ordnance Survey’s (OS) five-feet to the mile (1:1,056) map of London. The original map was surveyed between 1891 and 1895 and published between 1893 and 1896. The extracted vector layer comprises over 1.3 million building footprints, covering an area of ∼450 sq km (≈170 sq miles), detected with a precision of 97% and a recall of 95%.

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Articles in this issue

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/johd.602 | Journal eISSN: 2059-481X

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Language: English

Page range: 111 - 111

Submitted on: May 28, 2026

Accepted on: Jul 2, 2026

Published on: Aug 13, 2026

Published by: Ubiquity Press

In partnership with: Paradigm Publishing Services

Keywords:

London,

building footprints,

automatic vectorisation,

map recognition,

historical geodata,

digital urban history

© 2026 Remi Petitpierre, Isabella di Lenardo, Polly Hudson, Hendrik Herold, Katherine McDonough, Robert Hecht, Beatrice Vaienti, Christopher Fleet, published by Ubiquity Press
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Volume 12 (2026): Issue 1