Dulwich Hill

The above is from the Cary Map of London from 1786.  Click on sheet 35 from the main map. 

As you can see above, this map, published around 30 years after  Blake was born.  As I wrote a few weeks back:

As far as I know the story of Blake seeing the Angels comes only from the Gilchrist biography, written many years after Blake's death, which although excellent in its way does not, I think, have corroboration for this story from the Blake papers.

The location of the sighting (if there was one) is given as Peckham Rye (Dulwich Hill) which some have put closer to Warwick Gardens and not on the present-day Rye itself. So this recognition of an event which we aren't sure happened was probably in the wrong place.

The map, assuming it is reasonably accurate and shows the position roughly as it was in the 1760s, suggests instead that most of Dulwich Hill was further West than that, roughly the locaion of Champion Hill today.  And note the Fox Under the Hill in Cary, which seems to be in the same spot as today's Fox on the Hill.

However, Gilchrist actually writes "on Peckham Rye (by Dulwich Hill)." And if we look at the next sheet of the map, we can see what he might mean:

 The words "Peckham Rye" appear alongside the current day Rye Lane (as I estimate it), just to the east of Dulwich Hill.  Although it does give the sense that it is labelling the green area to the right of the words on the map.  So somewhere around Warwick Gardens, or the Bellenden Rd estate generally, may indeed be correct, or it could be that the "bespangling" was a little further east.

And I still wonder - did Gilchrist actually know the area or was he working from a map like Cary?