Enfilade

From The London Topographical Society:

Sheila O’Connell and Laurence Worms, eds., with an introduction by John Montague, a checklist of Rocque’s London maps by Ashley Baynton-Williams, and an index by Roger Cline, The A–Z of Georgian London and Its Environs: John Rocque’s Maps, 1746–1747 (London: The London Topographical Society, 2026), 207 pages, £23.

This publication reproduces at about fifty per cent actual size John Rocque’s two great maps of London in the 1740s: the 24-sheet Plan of the Cities of London and Westminster and Borough of Southwark and the 16-sheet Exact Survey of the Cities of London and Westminster, the Borough of Southwark with the Country near ten Miles round.

John Montague’s introduction tells the complex story of the development of the maps, incorporating new information on Rocque’s early life courtesy of Sandra Robinson. Roger Cline has produced an index of 6000 place names, over 250 places of worship, and sixty-four estates outside the urban centre.

Many of you will already know about the New Books Network, but if not, this conversation between Meredith Gamer and Kelsey Brosnan is a fine introduction! As described by the Wikipedia entry for the network:

The New Books Network (NBN) is a podcast network featuring interviews with scholars, researchers, and writers about their new books. Most of the books the NBN covers are non-fiction and published by university or independent scholarly presses. The mission of the NBN is public education. The NBN is the largest book-focused podcast enterprise in the world. It features over 130 ‘organic’ author-interview podcasts (“New Books in…”) produced in-house and over 100 ‘hosted’ podcasts produced by university presses, academic institutes, and scholars. The NBN publishes 70 episodes per week and has published over 30,000 episodes to date, all of which are permanently accessible for free on the NBN website. The NBN reaches 200,000 listeners monthly; those listeners download approximately one million episodes each month. . . .

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From the NBN website:

Podcast | Meredith Gamer, City of the Gallows, hosted by Kelsey Brosnan on the art channel of the New Books Network (27 July 2026), 62 minutes.

Meredith Gamer, City of the Gallows: Art and Execution in Eighteenth-Century London (London: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2026) uncovers the complex and often unexpected connections between eighteenth-century London’s sites of punishment and its spaces of art-making, instruction, and display. Drawing together a wide range of images, objects, and texts—from popular woodcuts and anatomical sculptures to moral tracts and dictionaries of slang—it offers new readings of works by major artists, such as William Hogarth, Johan Zoffany, and Joseph Wright of Derby, and shines a light on others that traditional accounts of the period have overlooked or ignored. In doing so, this book shows how state violence shaped the art and visual culture of this era, whose legacies persist to this day.

Kelsey Brosnan is an art historian specializing in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French art. Her book on the still-life painter Anne Vallayer-Coster was published by Lund Humphries and Getty Publications in 2026.