The ‘Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine’ 1611[12] by John Speed is arguably the second most important English county atlas ever printed and quite probably the most famous. It is the earliest published atlas of the entire British Isles. This unusual item put together in the late nineteenth century focuses on arguably its most important feature. The maps contained a total of 72 inset town plans or views, 54 of which can be identified as the work of Speed himself. The remainder are derived from other sources such as Georg Braun and Frans Hogenberg, William Smith’s manuscript of 1588 and others. They are the FIRST COMPREHENSIVE COLLECTION OF ENGLISH TOWN PLANS, some the earliest of their kind. This collection contains 62 of them along with other decorative features. It helps to focus our attention on this important series which is often overlooked for the map itself. Many of them are the first plan of the town and they were copied by many through the rest of the century. As today many of them contain a scale of distance or ‘paces’, a compass rose for direction and key to places of interest. Barber records that the survey work often took not much more than a day. Smith apparently took two days in Bristol and three in Winchester. Barber (2007) p. 1656-7; Bendall, Sarah (2002) ‘Draft Town Maps for John Speed’s ‘Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine”, in ‘Imago Mundi’ 54 pp. 30-45; Fordham ‘Town Plans of the British Isles’, in ‘Map Collectors’ Circle’ no. 22 p. 9; Speed, Jeffrey John (2001) ‘Tudor Townscapes John Speed’s Town Plans from the ‘Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine’, 1610′, in IMCoS Journal no. 86 pp. 17-22.