Since 1898

The House

Meridian & Co. was founded on an argument about a lighthouse, and has been arguing productively ever since.

In 1898 the harbour board of Saltwick Bay needed its approach charted properly and could not afford it. The man who solved this was Josiah Meridian, a marine surveyor who proposed the unheard-of arrangement of engraving the chart first and selling impressions to cover the cost. The board, having no better idea, agreed. The first plate paid for itself in eleven months, and the house never gave the arrangement up.

Three generations later the method is unchanged in every way that matters. Surveys are done from boats, not archives. Plates are cut by hand, one burin stroke at a time. Where the survey is uncertain, the plate says so, in the surveyor's own words, because a margin note in the engraver's polite paraphrase stops being evidence the moment it is prettied up.

• 1898

  Josiah Meridian surveys the harbour approach and sells the first impressions from a wheelbarrow on the staithe.

• 1926

  The double-line policy is born at Saltwick Reach: when the seabed moves, both positions stay on the plate.

• 1931

  Three winters in a rowboat produce the tidal atlas. The drift arrows carry their observer's initials to this day.

• 1937

  The auroral chart is engraved because nobody asked for it. It sells out anyway.

• 1948

  A wartime pencil sketch becomes The Inland Sea, hesitations and all.

• 1959

  The ice winter is charted buoy by buoy, coffin symbol included.

• Today

  Six plates restrike from the archive. Four bespoke commissions a season. The rowboat is newer. The water is the same.