‘If God himself on earth abode would make/He Oxford sure would for his dwelling take’. So wrote Ralph Agas, who made the first accurate map of the city in 1578. Oxford is indeed one of the most eulogised, and also one of the best-documented, cities anywhere in Britain, ‘unique’, according to the compilers of this atlas, ‘in its long tradition of minute topographical enquiry’. That tradition, dating back to Anthony Wood in the seventeenth century and continued by H.E. Salter in the early twentieth century, has been revived in this handsome, long-awaited and impeccably researched publication. At its core is a superb collection of ten newly drawn colour-coded maps showing successive changes in the town and city from the eleventh to the nineteenth centuries, accompanied by a set of six large-scale maps showing Oxford as it was in 1876, with the most significant historic features superimposed. The outstanding cartography is largely the work of Giles Darkes. We are also treated to reproductions of historic maps and topographical illustrations; a substantial introductory volume of 117 pages summarising recent scholarship on the history of the Oxford area and Oxford from prehistoric times to the present; a gazetteer of brief notes on the main streets and buildings; and a comprehensive bibliography. Taken as a whole, the atlas will be an essential starting point for all researchers on Oxford's history and topography for the foreseeable future. And, given its scope and its superb production standards, it is offered at a very reasonable price. It should appeal to anyone sharing the authors’ fascination with this most interesting of cities.

Our understanding of Oxford's early history has been transformed by research undertaken over the past fifty years or so, most of it in response to thorough and painstaking archaeology. This is abundantly evident in Alan Crossley's account of the city's Anglo-Saxon origins in chapter 3. Based in a lifetime's research, and involving the slaughter, or at least the wounding, of some long-revered sacred cows, he argues that the approach over a ‘ford for oxen’ to the west of the town was more important than that from the south to the fords, islands and bridges below St Aldate's (replaced by the Grandpont causeway and South Bridge in the late eleventh century).