Partly because it is honest. A photograph of the abbey west front tells you what it looks like today from the one angle a phone can manage between the ring road and the parked cars; a drawn elevation tells you what it IS — the proportions, the great window, the squat tower that was never finished. The county histories of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries drew buildings flat-on for exactly that reason, and it is still the clearest way to show somebody a facade they are about to stand in front of. Partly it is practical: half of what we talk about no longer exists, and you cannot photograph the Barracks Passage of 1904 or the seven-arch bridge before it was flattened by six feet in 1927. And partly it is a matter of not pretending. A drawing does not claim to be the thing. When we show you a photograph on a walk it is because it is a real photograph from the archive with a date and a reference number attached, and keeping the two kinds of image visually separate is the least we can do.

They are drawn in the studio above the passage from measured elevations, from the Ordnance Survey twenty-five-inch sheets, and from the plates in Owen’s copy of Owen and Blakeway’s History of Shrewsbury, which is 1825 and falling apart. The hatching is not decoration — in an engraving the density of the strokes IS the tone, and drawing it that way rather than filling a shape grey is what keeps the set looking like a set. Anyone is welcome to use them: they are ours, we are happy for schools and local societies to reproduce them with a credit, and several classrooms in the town already have the bridge on the wall. If you want a clean copy of any of the three at printing resolution, email Isla and she will send it. We would rather they were used than admired.

The route plate is drawn from the Ordnance Survey twenty-five-inch sheet of 1902, which is the last one made before the town centre was altered enough to matter, laid over a walk done with a measuring wheel in February 2024. The wheel is why the timings on the interactive map are honest: a mile and a quarter, six stops, ninety minutes at the pace of the slowest person on an average Saturday, which is a genuinely different number from the one you get by measuring the distance and assuming everyone walks at four miles an hour. What the plate is not is accurate. The river loop is drawn tighter than it is, the streets are straightened, and the six stops are spaced for legibility rather than for distance — exactly the compromises a Victorian pocket guide made, and for exactly the same reason. A map you can read at a glance while standing in a passage in the rain is more use than a map that is correct to the metre. If you want the correct one, the Ordnance Survey Explorer 241 covers the town and the record office has the 1902 sheet on the wall.