Ten stunning maps you should invest in

Shakespeare’s London. This wonderful birds-eye view of London during the reign of Elizabeth I is the very earliest plan of the city available to the collector. The City is still enclosed within its medieval walls with a single road, the Strand, leading out to Westminster. South of the river, bull and bear-baiting pits are on the site of what in 1599 would become the Globe Theatre. £16,000

This is the first European printed map ever to focus on China. Abraham Ortelius has used the work of Ludovicus Georgius, combined with the surviving shreds of knowledge of the Silk Road, the trading route that linked Europe and China in the Middle Ages until severed by the emergent Mongol Empire. Depicting the Great Wall and a number of cities, Ortelius’s map remained influential for decades. £13,500

This is the first map to show the mythical “Island of California” in 1627. The west coast of America was so inaccessible to most mapmakers that the peninsula of Baja California was thought to extend up the west coast as an “island” and this mistake was to remain on charts for well over a century. This glaring error in map making has become a particularly sought after feature for many map collectors. £28,000

This glorious world map with its elaborate upper border of the gods representing the planets is considered one the glories of decorative mapmaking. Jan Blaeu together with his father, Willem dominated mapmaking during the Dutch Golden Age of Cartography, a period roughly 1570-1700, when the engraving and hand-colouring of maps reached its absolute apogee. £32,000

William Heather produced some of the most important, accurate and beautiful sea charts of the early 19th century.  One of the earliest maps to show the island of Singapore, described as Pulo Panjang, with the named Singapore straits below.  This detail from his large chart of the Malacca Straits is engraved with typical elegance and shows coastal profiles and numerous depth soundings. Sea charts by their very nature were designed for use and this means that all early charts are exceedingly rare and therefore desired by collectors. £15,000

This superb and detailed map was drawn by Simeon de Witt, the first Surveyor General of NY appointed after the Revolutionary War. The detailed grid pattern of streets and avenues stretching all the way to 155 Street is almost wholly theoretical at this date as virtually no houses outside the tip of Manhattan had actually been built yet. This is one of the finest available early maps of the city. £8,500

Jack the Ripper’s London. This extraordinary map details the levels of poverty in the infamous slums of Victorian London’s East End in 1887. Each street is colour coded running from black, “Very poor, lowest class … vicious, semi-criminal” through blue, “Poor, casual … chronic want” up to red, “Well-to-do”.. The concern over poverty and social conditions in this area of East London was duly manifested in the year after this ground-breaking map was created, with the series of horrific killings that became known as the Whitechapel Murders. As the first socio-economic survey undertaken anywhere in the world this map is now considered an infographic icon. £6,500

This is one of the most powerful and evocative anthropomorphic maps of the early twentieth century. It shows the British bulldog and French poodle side-by-side facing the German dachshund and the Austro-Hungarian mongrel. The mapmaker, naturally unaware of the cataclysmic events to shortly transform Russia, depicts an implacable Tsar Nicolas II in a steam-roller about to flatten the Central Powers from the east. £7,500

Harry Beck’s iconic map is a design classic and is considered the most influential map of the 20th century. Virtually every country on the planet with a metro system has adopted Beck’s deceptively simple idea of a non-geographical representation of London’s Underground System. This particular example is the first quad size poster originally destined for a station wall and was never issued to the public. It is likely to be the only example to be ever offered for sale. £85,000