Cuningham's plan of Norwich (fig. 1), published in his Cosmographical Glasse (1559), has been called both a realistic reconstruction of Norwich as the surveyor ‘actually saw it’, and a manipulated and idealized image. Alongside important institutions and facilities, such as the cathedral, parish churches and the city's water-driven corn mills (to the left of the panorama), the most striking elements of the image are the gardens, pastures and orchards, the width and order of the streets, and the relationship between the urban centre and the open countryside around it. The splendid architecture and lush vegetation were not simply devices to please the eye. Cuningham's image conveyed a message: the quality of an urban environment determines its inhabitants’ health.

The plan of Norwich is now quite famous and it appears frequently in books on Tudor cartography and in histories of Norwich. But less is known about the man who created it. Indeed, the identity left to posterity by William Cuningham (or Kenningham, as he sometime spelled it) is both shadowy and ambiguous. One historian recently identified him as an associate of a gang of notorious charlatans peddling fraudulent prognostications in Elizabeth London, although his credentials as a skilled practitioner of technical arts and as a draughtsman have been noted by historians of navigation, cosmography and cartography. What little is currently known of his career and persona can now be sketched out. William's early life in Norwich remains largely a mystery before he moved to Cambridge to read arts in 1548. Enrolling as a pensioner of Corpus Christi, he matriculated in 1551, and was examined for his MB in 1557.