{"id":16643,"date":"2017-09-12T16:01:32","date_gmt":"2017-09-12T15:01:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ihbconline.co.uk\/newsachive\/?p=16643"},"modified":"2017-09-09T16:00:15","modified_gmt":"2017-09-09T15:00:15","slug":"the-roman-roads-of-britain-visualized-as-a-subway-map","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsblogs.ihbc.org.uk\/?p=16643","title":{"rendered":"The Roman Roads of Britain Visualized as a Subway Map"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Open<\/a>Sasha Trubetskoy, an undergraduate statistics major at the University of Chicago, has made a Roman Roads of Britain Network Map in the graphic-design style of the subway maps you’ll find in London or any other major city today.<\/h3>\n

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Open culture writes<\/p>\n

Walk around London with someone who knows its deep history \u2014 not hard to arrange, given the way London enthusiasts treat historical knowledge as a hypercompetitive sport \u2014 and you’ll have more than a few paths of \u2018Roman roads\u2019 pointed out to you. Even in the city of Big Ben and Buckingham Palace, the Shard and the Gherkin, chicken shops and curry houses, there remain fragments and traces of the 2,000 miles of roads the Roman Army built between British towns and cities between 43 and 410 AD, Britain’s centuries as a province of the Roman Empire.<\/p>\n

Though some of Britain’s Roman Roads have become modern motorways, most no longer exist in any form but those bits and pieces history buffs like to spot. This makes it difficult to get a sense of how they all ran and where \u2014 or at least it did until Sasha Trubetskoy made a Roman Roads of Britain Network Map in the graphic-design style of the subway maps you’ll find in London or any other major city today. Trubetskoy, an undergraduate statistics major at the University of Chicago, first found cartographical fame a few months ago with his \u2018subway map\u2019 of roads across the entire Roman Empire circa 125 AD.<\/p>\n

\u2018Popular request,\u2019 he writes, demanded a Britain-specific follow up, a project he describes as \u2018far more complicated than I had initially anticipated.\u2019 The challenges included not just the sheer number of Roman Roads in Britain but a lack of clarity about their exact location and extents. As in his previous map, Trubetskoy admits, \u2018I had to do some simplifying and make some tough choices on which cities to include.\u2019 While this closer-up view demanded a more geographical faithfulness, he nevertheless \u2018had to get rather creative with the historical evidence\u2019 in places, to the point of using such \u2018not exactly Latin-sounding\u2019 names as \u2018Watling Street\u2019 and \u2018Ermin Way.\u2019<\/p>\n

Still, barring a revolutionary discovery in Roman history, you’re unlikely to find a more rigorous example of subway-mapped Roman Roads in Britain than this one. And for $9 USD you can have it as a \u2018crisp PDF\u2019 suitable for printing as a poster and giving to anyone passionate about the history of Britain \u2014 or the history of Rome, or graphic design, or maps that aren’t what they might seem at first glance.<\/p>\n

The Roman Roads of Britain Visualized as a Subway Map<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n