A collection of Soviet satellite imagery dating back to the 1950s is giving many Britons a new look at their own country. Put together during the height of the Cold War, the maps pinpoint details of British geography.

Cities and rural areas, dockyards and warehouses, quarries and factories, even road surfaces – every possible detail can be found on the Soviet-time maps. Produced by Russian cartographers between 1950 and 1997, they are so rich in information that a digital mapping firm Envirocheck has bought them for use by property developers.

Some 16,000 sq km of British territory including 103 towns and cities, were mapped out, forming part of the most comprehensive global survey every attempted. The maps also have information about the width of roads, the height of bridges and even the depth of rivers.

“It's clear that the Russians were interested in working out how they could put tanks in the middle of cities. The rivers, the width, the depth and the speed helps them decide whether they can bring arms and tanks on by boat and the width of the bridges would allow them to decide if they would go into the city centre. That's my best assessment from what I've seen – there is no logical reason for them noting the fire retardancy of the buildings unless that's what they were planning,” believes Richard Pawlyn, Envirocheck expert.

Collector and expert in Soviet maps, John Davies, came across the drawings in a shop in Latvia and realised that in fact this is his homeland. But few people in Britain knew of the maps' existence.

“What's interesting about the Soviet maps of Britain particularly is the fact that they were making them throughout about a 50-year period, and they were entirely secret. People in Britain wouldn't know they were being made and the amount of detail and accuracy of them is staggering to us,” Mr Davies says.

John is a big fan of the work done by the Russians.

“If you compare the data of British maps that would have been available at any date against a Russian maps of the same date, the Russian map is often far more up to date. It's got new developments which hadn't yet arrived on British maps, so that shows us that they were very up to date with their publishing cycle and that they used sources other than published maps,” he says.

Mr Davies even invented a programme that can find any place, show it on the map in detail and translate the map into English. According to him, one of the most fascinating things to the British is to know the name of their town written in Cyrillic.