We have been making some changes to the data access system within A Vision of Britain through Time:
http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/data/
In particular, all of our map collection is freely downloadable EXCEPT for the maps produced by the Land Utilisation Survey of Great Britain (its director, L. Dudley Stamp, essentially published them himself and died only in 1967, so the original copyright lasts until 2037).
The collection includes a complete set of Ordnance Survey First Series one-inch maps from the 19th century, a complete set of OS New Popular Edition one-inch maps from the late 1940s, and a great many administrative boundary maps. The main caveat is that any of the scans were made ten years ago using lower-resolution equipment than would be used now, so quality is a little variable.
We have also placed the maps under a “Creative Commons — Must Acknowledge” license (CC-BY), which means the images can be legally re-used for any purpose, including commercial re-publication, provided we are very clearly acknowledged as the source — so you can copy them into your own web site, so long as you include a hyperlink back to Vision of Britain and an acknowledgment to the GB Historical GIS and the University of Portsmouth. See:
https://creativecommons.org/
One reason for using this very permissive license is so that my own students can include excerpts from the maps in the Wikipedia articles we have them working on, as all Wikipedia content is under CC-BY and they require it of anything being added. The course is essentially about writing short local histories of villages that were also Civil Parishes, using historical census data and using villages which had only “stub articles”. More about the course here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_Program:University_of_Portsmouth/Applied_Human_Geography_%28Spring_2014%29
Best wishes,
Humphrey Southall
Reader in Geography/
Director, GB Historical GIS
University of Portsmouth
Geography Dept, Buckingham Bldg,
Lion Terrace, Portsmouth PO1 3HE, UK
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www.visionofbritain.org.uk
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