MOSAIC PICTURE OF ST. PETERSBURG

Historical Plans

The special place among the cartographic heritage dedicated to St. Petersburg, is occupied by historic plans, ie plans illustrating the appearance of the city in different periods of time; they were compiled much later on the basis of various historical documents.
An excellent example of such publications is a collection of the «Historical Plans of the Capital City of St. Petersburg from 1714 to 1839», issued in 1843. From 1833 to 1838, in order to create the historical city plan, there was carried out an extensive work to find plans, drawings, and all the development projects of St. Petersburg since its foundation. A. Meyer was in charge of the work. The collected materials formed 7 manuscript atlases corresponding to the different periods of development of the city. Each of them was accompanied by a general plan of St. Petersburg, showing the actual development of the city. In 1839, general plans were published in the atlas with an appended index.

In 1846, the Military Topographic Service published «The Plans of St. Petersburg from 1700 to 1840».

Another edition of a historical plan was released in 1853 by the connoisseur of Petersburg N. Tsylov. This work is «Plans of St. Petersburg in 1700, 1705, 1725, 1738, 1756, 1777, 1799, 1840 and 1849, accompanied by 13 parts of the capital in 1853», that covers a period of 150 years. The atlas reproduced historical plans engraved by the Military Topographic Service on a smaller scale, and explanations to them; as well as general plans of 13 parts of St. Petersburg and the plan of 1849, reprinted from the «Atlas of the 13 parts of t. Petersburg». The plans contained in the atlas, were compiled using statistical sources, but not materials of topographic surveys. However, they are of great value as a reference publocations because they are very detailed and include a variety of materials. The Tsylov atlases were very popular in the 19th century; they give an essential information for researchers of the history of St. Petersburg, and they remain popular today.

In Soviet times, the first scaled publication on urban history was the «Historical Atlas of Petersburg - Leningrad» published in 1957. The atlas includes reproductions of maps, covering the period from 1703 to 1914, which give the whole picture of growth and development of the city and make it possiple to trace how the geography of the territory now occupied by St. Petersburg and its suburbs has changed. The second volume of the atlas, dealing exclusively with Leningrad, was issued in 1977.

«Leningrad. Historical Geographical Atlas» is the first comprehensive integrated atlas of the city, published in the USSR. In addition to the geographical description, its maps show the economic and cultural situation, the structure of the population of Leningrad. Historic plans depict the revolution of 1905-1907, the revolutions of February and October 1917, the Civil and Great Patriotic Wars.

The 300th anniversary of St. Petersburg served as another reason for the publication of historical atlases city. In 2003, there were issued two atlases: «St. Petersburg at the Turn of the Century. Historical Cartographic Atlas» and «Saint-Petersburg. Historical Geographical Atlas».

In 2004, there was published the atlas «Saint Petersburg. Plans and Maps» prepared by the St. Peterburg researcher S.V. Sementsov. The atlas contains annotated reproductions of historical and modern plans of St. Petersburg and maps of its suburbs (about 50 maps and plans), mainly, from the collections of the Cartographic Department of the National Library of Russia. In comments to the maps and plans, special attention is paid to the historical urban layout of St. Petersburg.

In 2012, the Department received two publications related to the history of urban development of St. Petersburg, these are »Saint-Petersburg on the Plans and Maps of the Twentieth Century. Historical and cultural scientific and popular publication» and «Petersburg Urban Planning Drawings». The second album uses archival materials of the Committee on Urban Planning and Architecture of St. Petersburg.