City Plans - Military Series

The city plan series differs from the regular topographic map series in three important respects:
1. The sheets are rectangular, the edges being defined on Gauss-Krüger coordinates
2. The coverage is non-continuous across a country, as the plan of each chosen city is designed as a single entity so that a set of map sheets is centred on and covers just the required urban area
3. They generally have a street index, a written description of the locality (Справка - ‘Spravka’) and have ‘important objects’ highlighted and listed.

City plans use the G-K projection and Coordinate System 1942. It is impossible to know definitively which cities were mapped (or even how many) – we only know of those which have surfaced in the West in recent years. Those known include about two thousand cities world-wide (not counting Russia itself), of which about 120 are in the United States and 100 in the United Kingdom. There are sure to have been many have been many more, which, like those of Russia, have not found their way into Western awareness. The earliest known sheets date from the 1940s, whilst the great majority were produced in the period 1960 to 1990.

Most are either 1:25,000 scale (usually large conurbations) or 1:10,000 scale, but a few examples are known of scales 1:5000, 1:15,000 and 1:20,000. In some cases, such as London, Liverpool, New York and others, the street index, ‘spravka’ and list of important objects were published as a separate booklet.

City Plans of the British Isles are available to view here
City Plans of North America are available to view here
City Plans of the Rest of the World are available to view here

Lists, location maps and translations of Spravkas and Important Objects here