aldercopse

antique folding & pocket maps

Email:   oldfoldingmaps@gmail.com

Tel: +44 (0) 7913 383346

About us

    We are a small family business that began over 40 years ago in other forms. I am the founder, Phillip, and I used to work for the Ministry of Defence.  One day at work I requested a £50 piece of equipment required for work on artificial limbs for service men and I was told "the longer you leave things the less urgent they become - so you can't have it."The worksheet had come in to the lab four years previously and was marked in big red letters 'URGENT'. After telling the boss he was a disgrace and being told that my career in the MOD was unlikely to progress, I resigned.

    Having recently married, my Father-in-law was unimpressed. A new money making idea was quickly hatched. It was 1973 and a ton of waste paper was £20. I quickly ran home to weigh the weeks newspaper - it was 16 lbs which meant 12.5 pence.  Working out a monthly collection from each household, and paying each homeowner 50 pence, I realised that only riches could await! Our best ever day we collected 11 tons off doorsteps - that's a lot of paper. Unfortunately, in 1976 the price of used paper crashed and I could no longer sell the paper. Another plan was needed as my riches receded.

Searching through the waste paper we found discarded books and maps. I took one to a second hand bookshop and got £5. Riches restored! I went back to the bookshop with more books the following week and noticed the shop owner had torn out all 100 illustrations from the book I had sold previously and was selling them for £1 each. Frenzied activity followed - destroying all the books for illustrations and selling them on Petticoat lane on a Sunday morning.

Despite having a good spell at Petticoat lane, the hard work made me look for other ideas. One day I noticed a big queue of tourists outside Madam Tussaud's and after finding some prints of London, and trying to convince Madam Tussaud's on a weekly basis to stock them, I eventually got an order for 10,000 and started selling them all over town. I needed somewhere to make them so I opened a gallery/workshop and started bespoke framing - prints, illustrations, original maps etc.  In the beginning the gallery was open seven days a week with my wife and friends doing the evening shift. Unfortunately disaster struck again when China began supplying the London tourist trade and so once again we redeveloped. We moved the business to smaller premises on Harefield High Street but the high rent, high rates and constant vandalism of the shop front meant we closed the gallery in 2006.

Having always been passionate about folding maps, over the years while dealing in them, I always wanted to keep the maps that I sold. They are very scarce and finding new stock was always a problem. From here came the idea to make re-issues. I built a workshop in my garden and it has taken a long time to learn the processes needed to make re-issue maps that are like the originals. All our maps are hand laid on cloth; we even make the glue to old recipes. Our frames are made from mouldings that we produce ourselves. Some are veneered using woods such as Birds Eye Maple and Indian Laurel, this being hand laid in the traditional way.

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We are a small family business based in rural Buckinghamshire. Not only have our maps sold all  over the UK but they have been bought by people as various as a small gallery in Beijing, interior designers in Australia, the BBC, restaurants in France and they have even appeared in a Hollywood film.