RAC 1936

453mm h x 999mm w (Cover: 241mm h x 116mm w)

RAC Barts Sheet 3 East Anglia RAC Barts Sheet 3 East Anglia

The Royal Automobile Club Quarter Inch Map of England & Wales

This time it is overtly a quarter-inch Bartholomew's map, named on the cover and on the map itself, but the map is far wider west-east and far narrower north-south than Bartholomew's own quarter inch maps. All four sides are numbered - 1 to 98 west to east and 1 to 43 north to south - which measure centimetres, which seems odd as it is only very approximately 2.5 Kms to the centimetre.

This is Sheet 3, East Anglia, out of the 12 sheets to cover England, Wales and Scotland - despite the cover only claiming England & Wales.

The map costs 5/- Net on Cloth, whilst membership of the RAC costs £2.2s (or £1.1s for cars with less than 10 horse power) and £1 for Motor Cyclists.

More details on Motoring maps are on the Publisher's page.

Scale correct at 13 miles = 82.7mm, or 4.0 miles/inch, ie 1:250,000.

The usual Bartholomew contour tinting is explained in the bottom right corner, plus the solid red line for First Class roads and the dotted red line for Second Class roads. It also explains "Ministry of Transport Road Numbering", which was introduced in 1922. Stanford-le-Hope is bypassed, which occurred sometime between 1929 and 1935. There is a railway line to Allhallows (in Kent), that opened in 1932.

There is a print code in the bottom left: 1110 - which doesn't help. There are no airfields shown (although there is no symbol for them in the legend), and roads through where airfields were built in the 1930s/40s, and hence an estimated date of 1936 (plus/minus 3 years).

© Peter Walker 2014