Chapman, John

John Chapman (fl. 1770–1777) was a London-based surveyor, publisher, and engraver. He produced maps of Newmarket, Durham, Staffordshire, and Nottinghamshire but is best known for A Map of the County of Essex from an Actual Survey (1777), created in collaboration with Peter André. This work, consisting of 25 sheets, has been described by Andrew Macnair as "the first detailed map of Essex to enable contemporaries to locate their village, market town, and even individual houses... capturing pre-Parliamentary Enclosure landscapes and preserving features that would vanish over the next five decades." Surveyed at a scale of two inches to the mile, it offered a level of detail unmatched until the Board of Ordnance maps nearly 40 years later. Chapman, raised in Dalham, Suffolk, worked in London with Mary Ann Rocque, widow of the influential cartographer John Rocque, and is believed to have died in 1778.