arcsec to the West and 0.378 arcsec to the North with respect to the EVN pointing centre (Table \[tab:obs\]). Before combination, we first shifted the pointing centre of the MERLIN data to align with that of the EVN data. The Lovell and Cambridge telescopes took part in both the EVN and MERLIN observations. We compared the amplitude of 3C 48 on the common Lovell–Cambridge baseline in the EVN and MERLIN data, and re-scaled the EVN visibilities by multiplying them by a factor of 1.4 to match the MERLIN flux. After combination of EVN and MERLIN visibility data, we performed a few iterations of amplitude and phase self-calibration to eliminate the residual errors resulting from minor offsets in registering the two coordinate frames and flux scales.

RESULTS – total intensity images
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Figures \[fig:MERcont\] and \[fig:vlbimap\] exhibit the total intensity images derived from the MERLIN, VLBA and EVN data. The final images were created using the [aips]{} and [miriad]{} software packages as well as the [mapplot]{} program in the Caltech VLBI software package.

MERLIN images
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Figure \[fig:MERcont\] shows the total intensity image of 3C 48 from the MERLIN observations. We used the multi-frequency synthesis technique to minimize the effects of 