Giles Darkes is the Cartographic Editor for the Historic Towns Trust (HTT) and manages their mapping and atlas projects. He was formerly Senior Lecturer in Cartography at Oxford Brookes University.

The Historic Towns Trust has for some years been producing and publishing 1:2500 historical maps in their Town & City Historical Maps series which aim to summarise a town's growth on a map. They show the sites of historical importance, both surviving and vanished and they're accompanied by an explanatory text and illustrations.

At the heart of them is a digitised OS map and, in this talk, Giles looks at the process of taking the OS base map and transforming it into a coloured historical map. He uses the HTT's Historical Map of Cambridge, launched in December 2023 as the main example, but touches on other mapping projects already published and in preparation.