HLG 119/392

ADMINISTRATIVE COUNTIES: Essex. County Maps

Date range	1957
Location	National Archives (see all files stored here)
Catalogue	See entry
File base	Series HLG, subseries HLG 119

This file is truly delightful. It is likely to bring a smile to your face, probably because it contains the sort of thing that makes trawling through dusty archive documents worthwhile. The thing in this file that makes your day might actually have nothing to do with its subject matter.

Context

If you want to see anything in the County Development Plan published by any particular county in the 1950s, when these things were produced for the first time, you will need to order literally the whole County Development Plan. This is the one for Essex. It comes as a massive box full of plans, reports and documents. It's a really beautiful artefact to look through (which is why it's tagged "delightful") and it's very easy to get sidetracked from whatever you might be looking for. The box contains all the paperwork relating to the publication of the Development Plan in the 1950s, including a special folder containing the legal instrument that approved it.

Contents of note

• The report of the Survey, which comes in two parts - this was a survey of the whole county, 1949-50, for the purposes of creating the Development Plan. Part II relates to "town maps" and has lots of population data, etc., and plans at the rear depict "Metropolitan Essex" (the bit then still within Greater London) including proposals for Radial Route 7 and the Docks Approach Road.
• Huge folders contain numerous "street authorisation plans", which are literally blow-by-blow proposals for new roads in suburbs and housing projects.
• The last folder contains the actual County Map, a County Programme Plan, a Metropolitan Essex Map and a Metropolitan Essex Programme Plan. The first of these four shows road proposals for the county, including the line of the elusive North Orbital Road.

People with camera copies

Chris Marshall has a partial copy.