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List of Names from the 6 inch O.S. Maps

List of Names from the 6 inch O.S. Maps of Kent (revised 1905/08)

   In 1933 a Dr F.W. Hardman, an East Kent antiquarian and lawyer, commissioned an unnamed unemployed clerk to extract all the place names he could find on the six inch O.S. Maps for Kent of the period, which had been last revised in 1905 and 1908.
   He carried out this task very methodically and produced an exercise book with some 4,000 place names in alphabetical order along with their parishes and a numbering scheme which Hardman devised in which he grouped all four quarters of the 25 inch map for one area with its own new number. These numbers started at the extreme N.W. of Kent with No.1 and proceeded to the East coast and so on southwards until No. 289 was reached. This East to West progression is the form which the O.S. Maps follow. For the sake of simplicity in numerical listing where a topographical feature is recorded e.g. a river crosses more than one map, the first map number only is recorded.
   At the time Dr Hardman had so many irons in the fire he passed the work on to his fellow K.A.S. correspondent and friend Dr Gordon Ward of Sevenoaks. After the decease of Dr Ward in 1962 his working papers were deposited in the Library of the Kent Archaeological Society of which he had been a member for some 35 years. Dr Ward was at the time greatly interested in identifying Anglo-Saxon place names contained in A.S. charters.
   Dr Hardman himself had long been interested in place name research and had produced a little booklet in 1927 entitled The Danes in Kent: A survey of Kentish Place-Names of Scandinavian origin.
  
Now some 70 years later Dr Paul Cullen has unearthed the manuscript book and I have taken the whole project one stage further. After newly re-listing the extracted place names they have now been regrouped alphabetically by parishes and numerically by Dr Hardman's code in the hope that all those at work in place name research will find this work of interest.
   It is worth mentioning here that the author of Kentish Place Names (1931) and The Place names of Kent (1934) namely J.K. Wallenberg used (amongst his great many sources) the one inch and six inch Ordnance Survey Maps of the period in the same manner as Dr Hardman's worker, but with surprisingly different results.
Frank Bamping 2004

To a large extent these data have been replaced by the online map service run by the National Library of Scotland.  Their free service permits online viewing, browsing and searching of the entire 6 inch O.S. from this period for Scotland, England and Wales. The service can be found at

http://maps.nls.uk/