MAP
ADDICT
MIKE PARKER

A TALE OF OBSESSION, FUDGE & THE ORDNANCE SURVEY

Copyright

First published in 2009 by Collins, an imprint of Harper Collins Publishers 1 London Bridge Street, London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Collins is a registered trademark of Harper Collins Publishers Ltd

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Text © Mike Parker 2009

The author asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780007300846

Ebook Edition © AUGUST 2009 ISBN: 9780007345175

Version: 2019-09-03

To Rachel.

At last.

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Dedication

INTRODUCTION

1. TREASURE ISLAND

2. L’ENTENTE CARTIALE

3. EVERY NODULE AND BOBBLE

4. BORDERLINE OBSESSION

5. THE POWER MAP

6. GOD IS IN THE DETAIL

7. CARTO EROTICA

8. BOYS’ TOYS?

9. PRATNAV

10. GOING OFF-MAP

BIBLIOGRAPHY

WEBSITES

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Copyright

About the Publisher

INTRODUCTION

Recently, some new neighbours moved in. They’d trekked halfway across the country, from the fringes of Manchester to their new life in our small village in the mountains of mid Wales. One night, I was showing them a good local walk, using my well-worn Ordnance Survey Explorer Map (OL23 Cadair Idris & Llyn Tegid, for aficionados). ‘Oh, yes,’ one of them mused. ‘That reminds me, I must get a map of the area.’

I swear the world stood still. What I wanted to say was, ‘You mean, you moved here from over a hundred miles away without buying a map first? Without taking it out on a nightly basis, stroking its contours, gently murmuring the unfamiliar names, idly following with your finger footpaths and streams, back lanes and bridleways, feeling faintly, randomly intimidated by the angular blocks of plantation forestry and sumps of squelchy moorland, excited by the wide beaches, towering peaks, limpid lakes and nestled market towns, all spread beguilingly across the paper? Without enjoying the thrill of anticipation of your impending move to a whole new world? Without checking out that whole new world, as captured by the gods of the Ordnance Survey? Are you mad? What in bejesus’ name is the matter with you?’

What I actually said was, ‘Oh, right. They sell them in the bookshop in town.’

If my cowardly internalised rant had you mentally nodding in agreement; if you like to check the map before a trip to B&Q; if you can sit and read a good map like others read Hello! or Heat, then this book is for you. You are a fellow-mappie, we are of one flesh. If, on the other hand, it’s got you thinking, ‘What a ridiculous over-reaction: what’s his problem, then?’ I’d advise you to put the book down now and walk away from it before it begins seriously to annoy you.

Many children have imaginary friends to help offset a lonely world. I had imaginary towns instead, and they were all intricately mapped. Hours would dribble by as I sat, tongue slightly protruding, drawing detailed plans of these fictional fiefdoms, giggling quietly to myself as I named the streets, threw in a ring road or bypass—this was the 1970s, after all—and methodically placing schools, stations and hospitals into the growing grid.

Any careers psychologist, observing this habit (especially the relish with which I’d drive a new dual carriageway through anything), would have predicted with utmost confidence that I was destined to become a town planner. But it wasn’t the towns or the buildings or the streets themselves that interested me—just the maps. It didn’t matter that they were imaginary; any map, any reduction of a complex landscape into two clean, clear dimensions, somehow thrilled and comforted me. More than thirty years on, it still does.

While some people, to shut out the insistent thrum of life, slide into the well-worn addictions of drink, drugs, sex, shopping, tattoos, piercings, plastic surgery, food or slicing themselves, my route of escape has long been thrusting my head into a map and staying there until the deafening buzz recedes. When all else around you is going psychotic, you can still depend on a map, and some of us can waste happy hours lost in its calm infallibility. Even the crisp smell of an Ordnance Survey provides its own instant Rescue Remedy.

My name is Mike and I am a map addict. There, it’s said. I’m the one in the car with the map in his lap, following its route with rapt concentration and a slowly moving index finger—often at the expense of seeing the actual landscape it depicts rolling past on the other side of the window. I’m the one who, on buying my first house, moved my entire map collection into it and ensured that it was perfectly shelved in its new home before bringing in anything useful, such as a kettle, toaster or teabag. I’m the one who will annoy anyone I’m sharing a flight with by repeatedly jabbing at the window and telling them which town we’re flying over, just because I recognised its shape and road pattern from decades of idle map scrutiny (and by the same token, I’m now the one losing whole days on Google Earth). It’s me who’ll spend longer planning a walk than actually doing it, who has to get the map out to go to the shops, who actually enjoys those interminable conversations about which route we all took to reach wherever we are, who can recognise the symbol for a bridle track or lighthouse (disused) at forty paces, whose favourite childhood show was The Wombles, simply because the little recycling furballs took their names from Great Uncle Bulgaria’s atlas. Actually, that’s not quite true. My favourite childhood show was Ivor the Engine, which combined maps with its exotic setting ‘in the top left-hand corner of Wales’: two of my passions deliciously stirred by one antique animation.

At the age of six, I began my own map collection, kick-started by a joyous discovery. My first true love was found lurking in the cellar when we moved into a new house. Not only was it my first love, it was my first cellar, full of spiders and dusty promise. The previous owners had left various bits of tat below stairs which were a pure treasure trove to me. A peeling mural of the Sergeant Pepper album title, painted by their adolescent son, filled one wall. I had no idea what it was or what it meant, but it oozed cool and teenage pheromones. But the true object of my affections lay hidden, covered in cobwebs, in the back of a dusty alcove. A relief map of the West Midlands and Wales, a good three foot by two, carved out in brittle plastic, its moulded hills soaring. It was love at first sneeze.

There was the sinuous line of the River Severn winding its way up through the Worcestershire towns I knew so well. The Malvern Hills, punting proudly out of the flat plains, looked like the brassiere of some ’50s Hollywood starlet, all swaggering panache and perky promise. Like a spreading ink stain, the big pink blotch of Birmingham and the Black Country seemed in danger of engulfing the little flecks of urban outposts surrounding it, my own home town included. And Wales looked so different, and so very foreign. Where the English side of the map was a mass of pink splotches and a tangle of roads ancient and modern on a landscape that barely rose to any noticeable toy height, Wales was dark, brooding and rippled with mountains that soared and plunged in mysterious plasticity. Tiny settlements, hardly any of which warranted any pink stippling, peeked out from valley floors and river confluences. The crags of Snowdonia, by far the largest and lairiest on the map, shot skywards and soon began to lose their markings, so often did I stroke their peaks in eager anticipation of the day when these little plastic bumps would become real to me.

Hours I spent in rapt contemplation of that map. I memorised the look and shape of the conurbations, of Bristol, Stoke, Chester, Coventry, Cardiff, Brum, Manchester and Liverpool, so that I could recognise them, like a psychiatrist’s inkblot test, in an instant. I ran my finger appreciatively along river courses, feeling the way the Mersey, Wye or Dee bubbled down from the hills, along ever-widening valleys before disgorging into the smooth blue expanses of estuary and sea. But nothing approached the tactility of the Welsh hills, whose come-hither bumps and lumps kept inviting me back for more.

Before long, I’d started to save my pocket money in order to buy maps, the fuchsia pink Ordnance Survey 1:50 000 series in particular. My step-mum donated an old sewing box with a padded hinged lid for my burgeoning collection, and it followed me everywhere, even on daytrips to bemused relatives. But there were 204 of the bloody things to collect, and on a fairly meagre allowance, it was painfully obvious to me that it would take decades to finish the job, an unimaginable yawn of time to a youngster. As a result, maps even accounted for the modest zenith in my teenage shoplifting career. While my mates were nicking records, sweets or fags, I was making regular forays into the Midland Educational Bookshop in Worcester to fill my school bag with bright, gleaming Ordnance Survey maps.

It was way too easy. While eagle-eyed shop assistants kept close watch on the pens and pads by the till, it was as free as a supermarket trolley dash in the ill-lit, dusty corner where the maps lived. My routine seemed foolproof. Like most fourteen-year-olds of the time, my school bag was a long sports effort with a large zip going the full length. Before entering the shop, I’d unzip it and wear it over my shoulder, with my arm held around it, keeping it apparently shut. I was never so stupid as to go straight to the maps; instead, I’d weave a tortuous route under the shop assistant’s eye, picking over fountain pens and ink cartridges, ostentatiously examining maths textbooks, Bibles and anything else that I thought would make me look like some useless swot or a pillar of virtue. While the shop assistant was busy serving someone, I’d dive into the far corner where a huge stand of OS maps sat beckoning. By now, my heart was thumping in my throat, school bag at the ready, unzipped, on the floor. I knew in advance which maps I wanted, and restricted myself to no more than five at a time—well, I didn’t want to be greedy. With a sleight of hand that would have impressed Paul Daniels, I picked the maps in question and swept them with one movement into my bag, covering them with school files or my football shirt. Then I’d get one map off the stand and noisily open it out to examine with rapt attention. Equally ostentatiously, I’d fold it back up again and replace it in the stand. Leaning down to pick up my school bag, I’d quickly zip it up again and hurry towards the till, smiling as casually as I could. Usually, I’d buy a pencil, a biro, a rubber, a cheap book or a sheet of Letraset, just to throw the assistant off the scent, before escaping back into the street with relief and euphoria flooding through me after yet another successful cartographic heist.

As a result of my regular larceny in the Midland Educational Bookshop, my Ordnance Survey collection grew exponentially in a very short space of time. I restricted my looting trips to no more than once a week, although, in what I thought at the time was a genius stroke of alibibuilding, I’d nip into the Midland Ed at other times and flagrantly avoid the map corner altogether. But once a week, the urge for more maps, of more areas, would hold me in its vice-like grip and I’d be in there and seizing the whole of Cornwall or Norfolk in one greedy swoop.

My parents and their mates benefited hugely from my map rustling. By the time I was fifteen, I was the unofficial map library to half of Kidderminster. If anyone was heading off for a weekend in Aberporth or a trip to Auntie Ethel’s in Godalming, it was me they came to for ideas on planning the route and getting the appropriate maps. Little did these upstanding citizens realise that they were handling stolen goods.

Maps have punctuated every twist and turn of my life. During the mental meltdown of early teenage years, my happiest times were spent in the company of my grandmother, touring the Midlands in an aged Ford Corsair with map on my knee and no idea where we were going. I’d be given carte blanche with the navigation, and would take us off down lanes that, from the map, looked worthy of a snoop or which led to places with odd or amusing names. Without knowing it, we were early psychogeographers, conducting our dérive with a flask of tea and a tin of boiled travel sweets. We’d pop into churches, shops and pubs, peer over walls and fences, engage vicars and batty old ladies in conversation, throw sticks in rivers, drive down country roads that looked, from the features on the map, as if they’d afford a bit of a view. When they did, my gran would congratulate me on my map-reading skills and I’d glow with pride and satisfaction, sensations all too rare in my hormonal hothouse.

Many of those trips were anchored by the Fosse Way, the great Roman highway that shoots like an arrow from Lincoln to Exeter. My grandparents lived in Leamington Spa, a short hop away from the Fosse. For most of its course through Warwickshire, the Fosse Way was a B road at best, and unclassified for large parts, despite being fast, straight and well surfaced. With hardly anyone else on it, it was our own private highway to all points north and south, a short plunge into the Cotswolds or the red-brick huddles of Leicestershire. Just north of the village of Halford, in the south of Warwickshire, the Fosse Way changes, in the course of less than half a mile, from an unclassified road (yellow on the OS), through a lightning-brief incarnation as the B4451 (brown), to a fully fledged major road, the A429 (red). I can still recall the electricity of anticipation the first time I spotted this coming up on the map a few miles on. Would this freak three-coloured road show its differences on the ground? I proudly told my gran of my discovery and, to her eternal credit, she showed as much enthusiasm as I did, telling me to let her know when we were crossing the invisible lines. ‘We’re going on to the B road…NOW!’ I hollered, finger almost through the map in excitement. Thirty seconds later, we were at the roundabout where the Fosse transforms once again, this time into a main road, and I was sated. The anomaly has, of course, been ironed out since. No longer is that Warwickshire stretch of the Fosse a gloriously underachieving, knock-kneed road only for those in the know. It’s all B and A now, and doubtless to be heard at every satnav’s monotonous recommendation.

Thirty years on, I find it faintly odd that I have far clearer memories of the way the map looked than practically any other part of those glorious days out, rambling purposelessly but fired with adventure. Even if I only go back twenty years, there’s a bit of a theme emerging: a month’s Inter Railing with a college mate has almost all been excised from my memory save for total recall of the Thomas Cook Rail Map of Europe circa 1988. A decade further yet, I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that I moved to mid Wales in part response to a map I’d been given as a present a year or two earlier, of The Railways, Telegraphs, &c of Great Britain Engraved Expressly For The A. B. C. Railway Guide from 1859. Black threads squirm their way across the country in lavish loops and race-for-the-line competition. Around London, Manchester and the coal seams of south Wales and Yorkshire, the knot of rails threatens to choke the living daylight out of the cities and towns. It’s called a map of Great Britain, but Scotland is sliced off at Aberdeen, so that the one patch of virgin purity, unblemished by angry lines, is the interior of Wales. There’s not one track between Brecon and the Nantlle quarries at Snowdon, nothing west of Oswestry or Leominster. A dotted line of vague intent ambles to Llanidloes, but that’s it. The gaping maw on the map pulled me in as I stared at it above my desk, and way before I really knew why, I had upped sticks to the sticks, a tiny mountain village on the edge of the Snowdonia National Park. It was either that map or a delayed reaction to Ivor the Engine.

My obsession with maps has even given me a strange sort of career. After leaving university, I lasted less than two years in proper jobs, before the urge to take to the open road, with an Ordnance Survey took hold and launched me as a travel writer, producing guide books to the West Midlands, Greater Manchester, Greater Glasgow and Bristol/Bath, and then into the stable of Rough Guide authors. My main work for them was as co-author of the brand new Wales book, though I also wrote various chapters of the early editions of the books on Scotland and England. Most people, on discovering that I was a travel writer, would look insanely jealous, up to the point where I told them that I was writing about Barmouth and Birmingham, rather than Bermuda and Barbados. ‘Couldn’t you get anywhere decent?’ was the stock response. But for me, it was the dream job, and remains so to this day: I love travelling abroad, but, as a writer, have only ever wanted to specialise in the amazingly diverse landscapes and culture of our own islands. Helped, of course, by the maps: my devotion to British mapping, the Ordnance Survey in particular, is so unyielding that exposure to foreign maps leaves me feeling disoriented and slightly perturbed by their inexactitude, harsh colours and inappropriate symbols.

For six years now, I’ve been writing and presenting offbeat travelogues for Welsh television that have allowed me to be as pedantic, opinionated and map-obsessed as I like. Gratifyingly, it’s been the more finicky features on maps, their nomenclature, borders and often strange history that have culled the biggest reaction and audience figures. And not just from gentlemen with fussy little moustaches, either (although there have been a fair few of them, truth be told). There’s a lot of us out there, moustachioed or otherwise.

Maps not only show the world, they lubricate its easy movement. On an average day, we will consult them a dozen times, often almost unconsciously: checking the A-Z, the road atlas or the satnav, scanning the tube or bus map, doing a quick Google online, flying over a virtual Earth, navigating around some retail behemoth on the hunt for a branch of Boots, watching the weather forecast, planning a walk or a trip, visiting a theme park or stately home, conference centre or industrial estate, catching up on the news, booking a holiday or hotel. Maps pepper books, brochures, advertisements, web pages and newspaper and magazine articles: we barely notice them because they do their job so well. They represent practically every area of human existence, conveying, at a stroke, precise information, not just about layout and topography, but history, politics, priorities, attitudes and power. They are the unsung heroes of life, and I want to sing their song.

Malcolm Saville’s frontispiece map for Wings Over Witchend

1. TREASURE ISLAND

‘Very well,’ said Uncle George. ‘But before you set out we must discover if you can really find your way by the map. You can have a great deal of fun from a map, you know,’ he added. ‘Especially when it comes to life!’

Joanna seemed quite startled to hear this.

˜ H. J. Deverson and Ronald Lampitt, The Map that Came to Life (children’s book from 1948)

Not for us British the wilderness, the outback or the week-long journey on the wide open road. Although folk have gamely tried it, there’s not much of a heroic tale to be told or heart-wrenching ballad to be wrung out of getting your kicks on the A66. The American or Australian relationship with their landscape is a world away from ours. They grab their beers and their buddies, before heading out into the gaping yonder for adventurous rites of passage, laced with deadly wildlife and treacherous topography, under skies that scorch the red earth by day and, by night, fill with fire-sparks twirling lazily into a canopy of stars. How many books, movies, TV series and songs have we all sat through that have ploughed that well-worn furrow? And what’s our equivalent? We go for a nice drive or a bit of a walk on a Sunday afternoon, through a landscape as tame as a tortoise, perhaps take in a stately home or a mouldering ruin, a country pub if we’re feeling rakish. If we really want to push ourselves to the limits of desolation, we might pop on our walking boots, pack some sandwiches and a thermos, and tackle ten miles, and a bit of a stiff climb, in the Peak District or the Lakes—sometimes going so far off the beaten track that we could be as much as an hour from the nearest cream tea. A landscape that has been so thoroughly explored, so comprehensively mapped and so exhaustively written about just isn’t going to throw up any life-threatening challenges. This is not Marlboro Country; it’s Lambert & Butler Land. And that’s exactly how we like it.

The map, spread lovingly over our knees, is the key to unlocking our interaction with what we nobly like to think of as our Great Outdoors. We set out, secure in the certainty that we are using the finest maps in the world: an index of all things possible, albeit all things measured, calibrated and recorded in painstaking detail. There may be no beasts to grapple with and precious little wilderness to explore, but we are quite happy to take our pleasures in far less sensational, less melodramatic ways. Nothing compares with the joy of setting off, not quite knowing where you’re heading, with just a map and a faintly heady sense of adventure to guide you. Sometimes, a nearby name, a shape or a symbol will leap off your Ordnance Survey and demand closer inspection.

On those lovely long childhood explorations in my grandparents’ Ford Corsair, where I’d be sat in the back precociously barking out navigation orders from behind a map, I can still recall the frisson of excitement that coursed through me on spotting, just outside the Warwickshire village of Long Itchington, a thrilling label on the OS: Model Village. These worlds-in-miniature, one of the many idiosyncratic gifts from the British to the rest of humanity, are a near-religious experience for the budding young map addict, and we can all remember our childhood visits to Babbacombe, Tucktonia and Bekonscot, or the much less impressive examples often found wedged between the crazy golf course and a candy floss stall in almost every seaside resort. Off we careered in that Ford Corsair in pursuit of the Long Itchington Model Village, even if none of us had ever heard of it before, which should perhaps have tinkled a distant alarm bell. As we got nearer, my excitement rocketed. ‘Next left!’ I hollered eagerly from the back seat. My gran obediently swung into—oh—a cul-de-sac of drab semis, with a distinctly ordinary county council street sign telling us that this was, indeed, named THE MODEL VILLAGE. It was a small estate built to house workers in the adjacent concrete works. Not a toy train or a miniature town hall in sight. I was deeply disappointed, quite cross and ever so slightly ashamed.

It’s no coincidence that the model village is an almost entirely British phenomenon. Bekonscot, the first and still the finest, has been bewitching its visitors since the 1920s, and still pulls in tens of thousands a year even now, despite being utterly devoid of things that bleep or flash. In fact, that’s its main draw these days: the perfect encapsulation of a long-vanished Enid Blyton England, all stout ladies cycling and butchers in aprons (Blyton was one of Bekonscot’s biggest fans, and even produced a book, The Enchanted Village, about it). It’s not just the miniaturised characters that appeal; it’s the whole experience, even that of arriving. You have to park up in an adjoining car park shared by a small supermarket and a church, then walk down a leafy path to find Bekonscot rooted in a residential side street. As you amble contentedly around the model village in what was once a suburban rockery garden, the stout precincts of Beaconsfield peer over the sensible fences. This Tom Thumb Albion seems so perfectly at home here, steadily, reliably plodding on with the minimum of fuss and the maximum of quiet pleasure.

Mapping and model villages are very British bedfellows. The gentle enthusiasts who created these places, and the generations that keep them going, have all spent long hours mapping their pretend worlds, giving every wood, road, cove, islet and cluster of tiny buildings a name and a whole back history. There’s a curiously devout idealism at work, a desire to create a better, brighter world, even if it’s only for characters just a couple of inches high. Bekonscot’s founder, Roland Callingham, approached his creation with much the same zeal as his contemporary Clough Williams-Ellis. To Callingham, the fact that his kingdom was miniature and Clough’s, at Portmeirion, was (almost) life-sized and for real people made little difference. It was, as Clough put it, a ‘light, operatic’ approach to town planning and design, but there are deadly serious principles at work here too: that humour and grace have a central role to play in our built environment, and will bring out the best in its inhabitants if employed well.

A growing map addiction dictated my juvenile reading habits too. I was inescapably drawn to children’s literature that set itself in places that I could find on the map, places that were unambiguously British, whether it was a real Britain or a parallel fictional one. The appeal of the books soared even higher if they started with a map of the part of the country in which they were set, and there was no shortage of these. At the local library, I scythed through the Malcolm Savilles and Arthur Ransomes, devouring each one in just a day or so, despite the hours spent flicking back and forth between whichever part of the story I was in and the frontispiece map that glued it all together. I’d find the real maps of the areas concerned, and thrill at what the author had included from the actual topography, and what had been a figment of his imagination.

I wish I could say that it was the Arthur Ransome books—Swallows and Amazons et al.—that I loved the most, but no. They were too gungho for my rather prissy tastes, with way too much boat-building, pirate dodging and nautical heartiness. Wild water was a largely absent element in the life of a Midlands schoolboy of the 1970s and ’80s: even the most vivid of imaginations would have had trouble conjuring up Lake Windermere, Coniston or the Norfolk Broads, let alone the high seas, out of our local oil-slicked canals, where you were infinitely more likely to see a dead dog floating by than a home-made raft. I wish I’d taken more to his books because, for starters, they are far better written than anything by Malcolm Saville, and because Ransome himself was such a fascinating character. Recent papers released by the National Archives reveal that he was a spy and possibly a double agent during the Russian Revolution, that he wrote passionately pro-Bolshevik articles for liberal newspapers and managed to get a divorce in the 1920s in order to marry Trotsky’s private secretary, whom he later brought back to the Lake District; they are buried together in the little churchyard at Rusland, near Windermere. Before his hurrah-for-the-Empire children’s books, he’d written a biography of Oscar Wilde and numerous articles that revealed his proud Bohemianism. Unless I was missing some deeply buried subtext, you really wouldn’t know any of this from the simple tales of youthful derring-do that later made him famous.

Sadly, I was much more of a Malcolm Saville kind of boy. By comparison, Saville led a life of unyielding rectitude, informed by a muscular Christianity, a towering snobbery and unquestioning acceptance of the need to obey authority in whatever guise it came. His books were relentless in promulgating these attitudes: policemen, teachers and vicars were always honest and right; anyone who wore a camel coat or dropped their aitches was guaranteed to be a no-good ’un. I lapped them up: although it was partly that I preferred mystery-solving capers to high-seas adventure, the main reason for my choice was, as ever, the maps. Arthur Ransome’s were lavish and lovely, but they were of parts of the country that I neither knew at all nor cared much about. Worse, they seemed ineffably childish, transforming real places into pretend River Amazons, Pirate Islands and Rio Grande Bays, even placing an imaginary Arctic and Antarctic on a plan of what I knew to be a small part of the Lake District. Malcolm Saville, on the other hand, set his stories in some of my favourite places and mapped them with far more appealing realism: those I knew well, like the Long Mynd in Shropshire or the area around Whitby and the North Yorkshire Moors, as well as those I was fascinated by and aching to see, such as the East Anglian coast or Rye and Dungeness on the border of Kent and Sussex. The stories were entirely secondary to their locations and the maps that showed them.

Enid Blyton was a gateway drug to the works of Malcolm Saville, for her books were full of the same jolly adventures in the boarding school halls, the same cast of picaresque ne’er-do-wells, the same crashing morality and class system carved in granite. Mallory Towers was a guilty, girly secret; I could take or leave the Faraway Tree and the Secret Seven, but I devoured the Famous Five books time and again. Saville’s Lone Pine Club members and the Famous Five seemed entirely interchangeable: they were led by identikit sensible boys with side partings, and each had an Amazonian sidekick who hated her girl’s name and insisted on a male equivalent—Peter (Petronella) of the Lone Piners, and every lesbian friend’s first pin-up, George (Georgina) of the Famous Five, with her licky dog, Timmy.

At the age of seven, I worshipped the Famous Five, even if their books suffered from one huge omission. There were no maps, no official sanction of the geography of Kirrin Island, Mystery Moor and all the other places I wanted desperately to believe in. I even resorted to drawing my own, but I knew that they would never feel like the real deal. Where were these places? There was a vague feeling and a few hints that the Famous Five’s romping ground was somewhere in the West Country, but Blyton managed to be sufficiently coy when pressed on the matter. That, though, hasn’t stopped the congenial Isle of Purbeck in Dorset from staking its claim as her muse and setting, and, to be fair, it has a good case. Blyton and her husband had many connections to the district, holidaying three times every year in Swanage’s Grand Hotel and swimming every day in the sea, doing a circuit around the town’s two piers before dinner. They became honorary residents of the district, Enid making it to president of the Swanage Carnival committee, while her husband, Kenneth, bought the Purbeck Golf Club in 1950. The impossibly cute—and congested—village of Corfe Castle, sheltering beneath its famous ruin (Kirrin Castle, apparently), promotes itself as the capital of Blyton country, with the Ginger Pop shop in the main square full of memorabilia, her books, old-fashioned sweets in jars, toys that no modern child would countenance playing with and the inevitable ginger beer. It is said that the PC Plod character in her Noddy stories was based on the village bobby at Studland, which, even in her day, was famous for its nudist beach; Blyton herself is reputed to have gone au naturel there. Thank God the Famous Five never stumbled across it.

In every Saville and Blyton, the format, like the countryside, was reassuringly constant. Everyone would converge for the hols, with aunties that only ever baked or knitted, hoping that their charges weren’t going to get into any scrapes this time, before some funny-looking, funny-sounding strangers arrived in the area to cause mayhem and a minor crime wave that only a gang of hoity-toity children could possibly solve. I, and millions of other small children cooped up in suburban bedrooms, longed for a life as action-packed and exciting, but it never came. Not for want of trying: I went through a phase of combing our local weekly paper, the Kidderminster Shuttle, for crimes to which I could turn my well-read investigative powers. (The Shuttle’s fine name, by the way, comes from the moving part of a carpet loom, in honour of the local industry. The acrid tang of carpet dye hung over the town for most of the year, beaten only in the winter months by the sickly smell from the sugar-beet refinery. It was a long way from breezy Dorset, or even the gloomy heights of the Long Mynd, just thirty-five miles down the road.)

One week, the Shuttle reported a break-in at a coach depot a few streets away. I persuaded my step-brother to join me on a nocturnal raid on the place, to look for ‘clues’. It was only when we hoiked ourselves over the gate and landed in the depot yard that it dawned on me that I wasn’t too sure what a ‘clue’ actually looked like, so we picked up everything, just in case. Weeks later, I found the soggy ball of old bus tickets and fag ends in my coat pocket and realised that we hadn’t managed to solve the crime, despite the bundle of crucial evidence. But at least we’d given the depot yard a nice tidy.

Malcolm Saville’s frontispiece maps were always purportedly drawn by David Morton, the leader of the Lone Piners. Sixteen-year-old David didn’t speak much, but when he did, everyone listened and invariably agreed with him. He was strong of jaw and firm of friendship. And he could draw a great map. Whether I was aching to be him, or be with him, I’m not quite sure, but I took to drawing my own maps that, like David’s, were a hybrid of the real and the imaginary. It was fun improving upon landscapes that I knew, adding in a haunted mansion to replace the golf club, putting in a new railway line, upgrading the parish church to a cathedral, spitefully taking out streets that I found depressing or ugly: there was plenty of choice in 1970s Kiddy.

Logically, I should have ended up as a dorkish (or perhaps Orcish) devotee of J. R. R. Tolkien, for the maps of his vast fantasy landscapes were an essential part of their appeal. Furthermore, Tolkien was a fellow Midlander who’d loved his maps, drawn his own and become fascinated by the otherness of nearby Wales: it was seeing the coal trains, emblazoned with the names of Welsh mines, rumbling through his Birmingham suburb that had first inspired him to enter the world of linguistics, and, to this day, there are those who are convinced that the ethereal gobbledegook of Elvish was based on the Welsh language. Some claim too that his maps of Middle Earth were inspired by the topography of mid and north Wales, fuelling a popular insinuation, best expressed by A. A. Gill, arch-cynic about all things Welsh, that ‘everything [in Wales] that wasn’t designed by God looks as if it was built by a hobbit’. But Tolkien left me colder than a Mordor winter: why invent such elaborate landscapes with such daft names when there were so many fine ones to be had in the real world?

This peculiarly British habit of drawing elaborate maps of fantasy landscapes is perhaps one element of our colonial hangover, for it’s not dissimilar to the way in which we first mapped the real world. Almost all advances in cartography in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries came as a result of our imperial adventures, when British ships plied the four oceans and brought back news—and beautiful new maps—of far-off lands to a wide-eyed population. Although many of the voyages were for trade or for battle, the public interest was more sensationally stoked by the expeditions that set out to fill in the blank parts of the globe, a globe over which Britons were becoming ever more confident of their supremacy. So much of the world was known by now, and it was the bits that remained a mystery—particularly the polar regions and the ‘dark heart’ of Africa—that inspired most fervour, among the public as much as the participants.

It was all done in a joyously British way: with bags of enthusiasm, a smattering of snobbery, a conviction that we knew best and a healthy dose of hit-and-hope optimism. There were many notable victories, but rather more ignoble defeats, to punishing climates, unheard-of diseases and locals who were not as pleased to see the explorers as the latter rather thought they should be. Along the way, the explorers would draw their charts and maps, loyally naming rivers, mountains, creeks and even delirious optical illusions after minor royalty and government officials back home. It wasn’t so far in spirit from those of us who mapped and named our imaginary towns a century and a half later.

Public hunger for news of these expeditions was nigh-on insatiable, and newspaper and periodical editors swiftly realised that an accompanying map of distant conquests was worth a thousand words and produced a sizeable hike in sales. Although the Ordnance Survey had been in existence since 1791, it was run solely as a military arm of the government—quite literally, a Survey for the Board of Ordnance, forerunner of the Ministry of Defence. Their starchy approach was of little interest to the general public and the press, who far preferred the maps of commercial cartographers. The finest ever seen in Britain were by John Bartholomew & Son of Edinburgh.

There’s always a tendency to conflate British and English achievements, though it should be even more stridently avoided than usual in terms of mapping, for both Wales and, to a far greater extent, Scotland had cartographic ambition of their own. Edinburgh, especially, became one of the great centres of map-making during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Bartholomew’s, with its distinctive, blue-covered maps, was the ultimate traditional Edinburgh family firm. Founded by the first John Bartholomew in 1826, the baton was passed down from father to son, each one also called John, until the death of the fifth John in 2008 finally ended the distinguished line. Although the Bartholomew name continues in the mapping division of Collins Bartholomew, it is not as a company that any of the Johns would much recognise. In the 1970s, John the Fifth, together with his brothers Peter and Robert, had, for the first time in a century and a half, brought new blood from outside the family into the company’s management structure. The new blood rather turned on them, forcing the sale of the company to Reader’s Digest in 1985, and thence to News International. It was a terminal move. In truth, though, the end had been steaming towards Bartholomew’s at great speed, for it had slightly lost its path and was in no state to survive the tidal waves of the Thatcher revolution.

It was a long way from the glory years. John the First (1805-61), like his father a jobbing engraver of exceptional ability, had begun to specialise in maps. His were quite gorgeous: the precision of his engraving on the copper sheets created maps of unprecedented accuracy and detail, far better than anything the Ordnance Survey were producing at the time. His first published map, the 1826 Directory Plan of Edinburgh, was lavish and lovely. Looking at it now, what is most remarkable is how little this monumental city has changed in nearly two centuries; aside from the markets and narrow closes cleared for the building of Waverley station, you could easily use it to steer yourself around today.

John the First’s Edinburgh was a cauldron of high artistic and scientific specialism, producing the best reference materials in the world. Out of it came not just Bartholomew’s, but the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, The Scotsman and the publishing houses of Constable and A. & C. Black. Just around the corner from John’s first works was the printing shop of brothers William and Robert (W. & R.) Chambers, later to become mighty publishers of dictionaries and other reference works. Edinburgh was a hotbed of all kinds: the Chambers brothers habitually slept under the counter of the shop, in order to fight off the regular nocturnal raiders.

The firm grew in a typically modest, rather Scottish way; steadily nonetheless. In his first year of business, John earned a total of £78 16s 6d, and by the time of his death in 1861, when John Junior took over the reins, they had about twenty employees and an annual wage bill of over a thousand pounds. John Junior, and his son, John George, combined cartographic excellence with canny business acumen; Bartholomew’s boomed. In that, it had considerable assistance from the mood of the times: maps were the hottest new property and the public had a seemingly insatiable appetite for them. The explosion of the railways was chiefly responsible, from the need for lavish plans and prospectuses to be presented to government and as an incentive for investors, right through to their completion, and the public’s desire to see where these new steam beasts could take them. Each copper sheet would have to have the appropriate parts beaten out on an anvil and reengraved with the new railway, but it was worth every bit of trouble to the map-makers, for the results flew off the shelf.

Then there was the steam revolution on the seas too, necessitating maps of the growing number of commercial and military liners ploughing the oceans, as well as maps of the mystery lands now reachable from the ports of Southampton and Liverpool. The growing Empire needed mapping, while in Britain itself there was the rapidly changing electoral map of a country that was grudgingly allowing more and more people to participate, and, before long, the first leisure maps for those who wanted to pedal into the countryside of a Sunday on their trusty boneshaker. Bart’s also created new markets, particularly of world atlases, for both adults and children. As Rudyard Kipling commented in an address to the Royal Geographical Society in 1928, ‘as soon as men begin to talk about anything that really matters, someone has to go and get the Atlas’. Bartholomew’s reacted to each opportunity with relish and speed, and considerable aesthetic élan.

For the firm’s trump card was not its tight-knit family fortress and sensitive ear to the ground, but the sheer poetic beauty of the maps. Simple, yet packed with information but never too crowded: everything just so (in a Morningside accent). Its most famous original feature was the use of colour shading between contours, through a spectrum of greens for the lower ground, browns for the middle, purple and finally white for the snowy peaks. Bartholomew’s did the same in the areas of sea, with bathymetric contours of ever-darker shades of blue to indicate the deepening fathoms. Although this became a common cartographic tick, no one ever did it better than the company that first introduced it in 1880, and it remained Bartholomew’s signature until the final maps limped out just over a century later. This was thanks to perhaps the greatest John, number three, John George (1860-1920), who was utterly obsessive about colour harmony, and not just on his maps. When postage rates rose from a penny to a penny halfpenny, he despised the shade of brown adopted for the new 1¹₂d stamp, and insisted on using a penny red and a halfpenny green instead.

In the nineteenth century, the cartographic establishment was a fearsome beast, and it didn’t take well to the rather dour, shy Scotsmen and their surprisingly flash commercial ways. The firm resisted takeovers and mergers, even from John George’s relative by marriage, map-maker George Philip of Liverpool. The first great map mavericks, they refused to countenance the business leaving the family, or even leaving Edinburgh. They were also notoriously poor of health, and often ascribed some of their business success to this very fact, for they believed that disabled people made the finest cartographers, if only because they were less likely to move around so much, and were thus able to maintain the extreme concentration demanded by the job.

Bartholomew’s most celebrated map—the Times Atlas excluded—was its Half Inch series, originally marketed as the Reduced Ordnance Survey, after John the Second had hammered out a deal with the government’s own map-makers and before the Copyright Act of 1911 forbade such a practice. God-fearing, sober and unable to come up with any name more exciting than John they may have been, but they weren’t averse to some fierce self-promotion, if it sold one more map. When, in the early 1890s, John George moved the company into a splendid new building by Holyrood Park, he grandly christened it the Edinburgh Geographical Institute. Less impressively, it was located on a street called the Gibbet Loan, which John George felt detracted from its address. No problem if you’re the city’s most revered map-maker, however. He simply changed it on the next map of Edinburgh to the altogether more elegant, if anodyne, Park Road, the name by which it is still known, and mapped, today.

It was through the blue Half Inch series that I was first introduced to Bartholomew’s as my map addiction flourished through the 1970s. They had a striking but slightly old-fashioned quality to them, and I quickly came to associate them with the bookshelves of elderly relatives and the smell of beeswax. I was Mr Now in my map choices, an enthusiastic consumer of the brand new metric OS sheets in their dazzling pinky-purple covers. Thanks to the soft poison of nostalgia, now that they’re no longer produced, I find Bart’s maps absolutely charming, and can admire their clarity, precision and use of colour for hours. In their heyday just prior to the First World War, they outsold the Ordnance Survey’s own Half Inch by at least ten to one, so far eclipsing them that the OS eventually killed their own series and focused instead on the one-inch scale. Bartholomew’s was outshone in its turn too, eventually. Sales started to dip badly throughout the 1970s: after all, why buy a host of separate maps, when each one costs nearly as much as a road atlas of the entire country at a scale that is only slightly less? The Bartholomew list was trimmed extensively in the 1980s, with only popular tourist areas such as the Lake District and the south-west peninsula getting updated. Even that wasn’t enough to staunch the haemorrhage of sales, however, and the whole series was quietly pensioned off at the turn of the final decade of the twentieth century.

On the international stage, Bartholomew’s finest hour came in its production of the mighty Times Atlas of the World, still regularly cited everywhere as the finest atlas available. There had been two previous editions, in 1895 and 1900, published by The Times newspaper in London, before Bartholomew’s came on board in 1920 and transformed the book into the beautiful ogre we now know and love. Even in these days of such intricate online mapping, the Times Atlas, with its enormous pages and crystal clear cartography, is more than maintaining its value, and is likely to do so long after other paper maps have been blown away.

If the Times Atlas has shouldered all global opposition out of the way by dint of its sheer heft, then the prize for pared-down elegance and practicality must go to that other great British cartographic icon. Arising from far more lowly beginnings, Harry Beck’s 1933 map of the London Underground has been emulated and impersonated all over the planet. It is a masterstroke of simplicity, stripped of all surplus information and conveying everything it needs to in the most efficient way possible. Beck realised that, once you were on the tube, your real geographical position was of no great consequence; all you needed to know was the names and order of the stations and where the lines intersected. All surface-level features, save for the River Thames, were cleared from the map. Basing his design on an electrical circuit diagram, with all lines at either 90° or 45° angles, he first took it to the Underground’s publicity department in 1931, who turned it down for being too revolutionary. Two years later, he tried again and it was accepted, with some trepidation. No need: the public loved it, and have continued to do so ever since.

In fact, as a nation, we’re obsessed with this map, more so than it perhaps deserves. Don’t get me wrong; it’s good, very good indeed, even if it’s not been quite right ever since 1991, when they dropped Bank station down a bit to merge with Monument and the new Docklands Light Railway extension. Not only did this consign to the bin the legendary ‘escalator link’ between Bank and Monument, it committed the unpardonable sin of kinking the hitherto ruler-straight Central Line, which used to shoot from Ealing to Mile End, right along Oxford Street, like a bright red harpoon, before veering sharply north into Essex. At least, I suppose, it’s saved generations of inquisitive twelve-year-olds from the crushing anti-climax that I experienced when, on a family trip to London, I peeled off to go and investigate the ‘escalator link’ at Bank-Monument, something that had long intrigued me on the map. Imagining some futuristic subterranean world of travelators and quite possibly a teleportation pod or two, I was cruelly disappointed to find instead a long, dank corridor and a small, clanking escalator.

Woe betide anyone whose adoration of Harry Beck’s tube map encourages them to attempt any kind of homage to it. In 2006, a self-confessed tube geek produced a quite inspired version of his own, each station faithfully rendered into an accurate anagram. Some were strangely apposite: Crux For Disco (Oxford Circus), Sad Empath (Hampstead), Written Mess (Westminster), Swearword & Ethanol (Harrow & Wealdstone) and the faintly creepy Shown Kitten (Kentish Town). Some were plain daft or bawdily Chaucerian: A Retard Cottonmouth (Tottenham Court Road), Pelmet (Temple), Burst Racoon (Barons Court), This Hungry & Boiling (Highbury & Islington), Wifely Stench (East Finchley) and Queer Spank (Queens Park). His map lit up the internet, getting over 30,000 hits in the first few days. And then the lawyers muscled in. If you Google it, you will find it, but only after coming across numerous pages telling you: ‘Content removed at the request of Healeys Solicitors acting on behalf of Transport for London and Transport Trading Ltd.’

Transport for London, whose predecessors paid Harry Beck just ten guineas for his original work, have been more than happy to license the tube map for an unholy array of tacky souvenirs. The anagram map’s creator has publicly stated that he doesn’t want any payment for it, but he wants it to be freely distributed. The idea has been picked up by artists the world over for their own transport systems. But still TfL are attempting to excise the map from cyberspace, a task only marginally less futile, and impossible, than trying to push toothpaste back into the tube. The map is a wonderful work of art: humorous, striking, colourful, beautiful. It makes Simon Patterson’s much-lauded, Turner Prize-nominated Great Bear, a Beck map where the stations are replaced with the names of artists, writers and composers, look very limp indeed. Patterson’s original was bought by the Tate, and limited prints have been snapped up for tens of thousands, by Charles Saatchi among others. It has made an awful lot of money, with full support from TfL. But then they do get 50 per cent of the proceeds, which—on the bright side—at least means that not all of their lawyers’ fees to pursue pointless causes have to come from the money you paid for your Travelcard.

It’s no coincidence that the two most lionised British maps, each dripping with myth and adoration, subjects of a glut of books, blogs and websites, are Harry Beck’s tube map and Phyllis Pearsall’s London A-Z (on which, more later). Despite the shrill claims of cities like Birmingham and Manchester, London remains our only true metropolis, effortlessly swatting away the pretensions of its minions. These two iconic maps are the fine line that separates experiencing the capital as either a cosmopolitan labyrinth of untold possibility or a coruscating pit of hell. Their overblown status in the story of our national cartography corresponds to the status of the city itself: if it happened in London, even if only in London, it is per se of nationwide significance. Although such self-regard drives us all mad in ‘the provinces’, we wouldn’t have it any other way, for who wants a capital city without a cocky swagger in its step?

There are many rather quieter examples of the best of British mapping. Harry Beck might be the patron saint of Hoxton bedsit bloggers, but for the cagoule crowd further north, the great god is Alfred Wainwright and his hand-drawn guides to the Lake District. To his legion of devotees, Wainwright represents all that is best about the stoic determination of the English fell-walker, and his precise Indian ink drawings, maps and text written in a hand that never wavered are possibly the finest an amateur has ever produced. In 1952, he decided to embark upon a series of books, carving the Lakes into seven distinct areas that encompassed all 214 fells (hills), and worked out, with pinpoint precision, that it would take him fourteen years. The last book was duly published, bang on time, in 1966. To achieve his goal, he spent every single weekend, come hell or—more often—high water, walking alone, drawing and note-taking in the mountains in collar, tie and his third-best tweed suit. On Monday morning he would return to work as the Borough Treasurer of Kendal Council, coming home to spend every evening shut away in his study, painstakingly writing up his notes of the previous weekend’s hikes. Small wonder that his wife Ruth walked out on him just three weeks before his retirement in 1967.

Wainwright became something of a reluctant celebrity in the 1970s and ’80s, playing up to his curmudgeonly image by rarely granting an interview unless the would-be interviewer trekked north to see him. Sue Lawley, for Desert Island Discs, perhaps wished she hadn’t bothered, for Wainwright was sullenly taciturn throughout the programme. The tone was set right at the outset, when she asked him, ‘And what is your favourite kind of music, Mr Wainwright?’ To which he gruffly answered, ‘I much prefer silence.’

He had started so well: his first book, The Eastern Fells, published in 1955, was dedicated to ‘The Men of the Ordnance Survey, whose maps of Lakeland have given me much pleasure both on the fells and by my fireside’. Those first seven books bristle with dry humour and an encyclopaedic eye for the crags, lakes and wildlife of his adored, adopted Cumbria (he was raised in Blackburn). In later years—and, as we’ll see, in something of an all-too-common pattern for map addicts—the dry humour evaporated into brittle bigotry. In his final book, a 1987 autobiography called Ex-Fellwanderer, he let rip with his loathing of women and how he advocated public executions, birching, a bread and water diet for all prisoners and the castration of petty criminals and trespassers. As ever, such miserly chauvinism was underpinned by a blind, blanket nostalgia. ‘These were the bad old days we so often hear about,’ he wrote. ‘But were they so bad? There were no muggings, no kidnaps, no hi-jacks, no football hooligans, no militants, no rapes, no permissiveness, no drug addicts, no demonstrations, no rent-amobs, no terrorism, no nuclear threats, no break-ins, no vandalism, no State handouts, no sense of outrage, no envy of others…Bad old days? No, I don’t agree.’ Strangely enough, at the other end of England, Harry Beck was descending into similarly obsessive and reactionary views in his latter years.

Like most egomaniacs, I can hardly listen to Desert Island Discs without mentally working on my own list for the programme. Save for a few dead certs, my choice of eight pieces of music is forever changing, but the candidate for my eternal book (aside from the Bible and Complete Works of Shakespeare) is blissfully simple and steady. Well, I’ve got it down to the final two, both map-related: the Reader’s Digest Complete Atlas of the British Isles from 1966, and, pre-dating it by a year or so, the AA’s Illustrated Road Book of England and Wales. Map addicts often reveal themselves on Desert Island Discs: plenty, including Joanna Lumley, Matthew Pinsent and explorer Robert Swan, have chosen a world atlas as their book; David Frost picked a London A-Z. Best choice, though, was that of Dame Judi Dench, who confirmed her place in the pantheon of National Treasures when she chose ‘an Ordnance Survey map of the world’ as her book in 1998.

Both of my choices are beautiful works, but I love them mainly for being such remarkable snapshots of a very specific moment in time. They are graphic, lavishly detailed pictures of the world into which I was born at the tail end of 1966. No one knew it then, but they represent a world on the cusp of fundamental cataclysm. Our industrialised island, crammed full of mines and quarries and factories and railways, was shortly to become a post-industrial place of shopping centres, theme parks, light industrial estates and speedy roads. Nineteen-sixty six was the border between those two worlds, the year that saw both the last, gruesome gasp of the old order at Aberfan, and the sapling stirrings of our future economy, a leisure industry kick-started by the English victory in the football World Cup. It was the beginning of the era when the future ceased to be the national fetish, to be replaced, ultimately and ominously, by a slavish obsession with the past.

The battle between the future and the past raged through the late 1960s and the entire 1970s, through psychedelia, sexual liberation, student uprisings, strikes, power cuts and punk, but by the time the 1980s dawned, the past had won. Margaret Thatcher, the Grantham grocer’s daughter, invoked the Britain of a bygone age to anaesthetise us to everything, from small colonial wars to her battle to destroy organised labour. Nostalgia became a driving force of the economy: the backdrop to the breakneck changes that we choose to remember is ‘Ghost Town’ and Orgreave, but it could just as easily have been the multimillion selling Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady or the spin-off frills and frou-frou by the likes of Laura Ashley. The landscape, and hence maps, began to change too: town centres, the mercantile heart of the nation for over a thousand years, wilted in the heat of the new retail parks that were mushrooming alongside new bypasses and motorways. Heritage centres, heritage railways, industrial heritage, history denuded of its scandal and gore, erupted all over the country like a pox rash.

Just how much Britain has changed in a couple of generations is witheringly evident from these two books. The Reader’s Digest Complete Atlas of the British Isles is a huge tome: 230 A3-sized pages of maps, charts, diagrams, illustrations and tiny text showing the geography of these islands in every imaginable detail, social, cultural, industrial and political, a generation on from the end of the Second World War. The book was a mammoth undertaking: the committee of consultants, listed on the second page, comprises 118 individuals and organisations, from the Ministry of Power to L. P. Lefkovitch, BSc, of the Pest Infestation Laboratory in Slough; Professor H. C. Darby, OBE, MA, PhD, LittD, to Éamonn de hóir (a mere MA) of the Ordnance Survey, Ireland. It includes a loose-leaf insert designed to promote the book, a document that oozes 1960s paternalism at its most lordly. On one side, three experts (two of whom sport florid Edwardian moustaches) sing the volume’s praises; on the other is a long list of questions, the answers to which can be found on pinpointed pages of the atlas.

‘Do you know…’ it asks, as if peering beadily at the reader over its half-moon glasses, ‘how long a Queen Ant lives? (page 110)’. Hurry to page 110, and there’s your response: ‘ten years’. ‘Where the Moscow-Washington “Hot Line” enters Britain? (page 151)’, ‘Which was the first stretch of motorway to be built in Britain? (page 147)’, ‘Where the first known human in Britain dwelt? (page 77)’, ‘The rate of air traffic at London Airport? (page 144)’ and ‘On what date the Earth is farthest from the Sun? (page 90)’. The answers being: Oban; the eight and a half miles of the Preston bypass in 1958; Swanscombe in Kent; every two and a half minutes in summer, three and a half in winter; and July 2-4.

Another section headed ‘Where in the British Isles…’ continues with such questions as: ‘…did dinosaurs live? (page 74)’, ‘…are there oil wells? (page 153)’, ‘…are the most crimes committed? (page 134)’ and ‘…do they say “mash the tea”? (page 123)’. That’ll be Dorset, Nottinghamshire, Greater London and (oddly) Flintshire, and finally, most of the Midlands and north of England.

The book is a pub quiz of gargantuan proportions. Every page has you tutting in surprise and oohing in wonder, and occasionally laughing at the chest-puffed earnestness of it all, the world as seen from the gentlemen’s clubs of SW1. According to the atlas, not only do we ‘mash the tea’ where I grew up, we say ‘I be…’ rather than ‘I am…’, drop our aitches, call a funnel a ‘tundish’ and get as pissed as an askel, rather than a newt, all of which was news to me. The most wildly diverse regional expressions seem to be for the concept of left-handedness, or keck-handedness as we had it in Worcestershire (that I do remember). Just be grateful you’re not left-handed in the Pennines (dollock- or bollock-fisted), Durham (cuddy-wifted), Galloway (corrie-flug) or Angus (kippie-klookit).

The Britain of 1966 was a nation still toiling and grafting and knowing its place. A double-page map of ‘Birthplaces of Notable Men and Women of the Past’ indicates that most of our Notable People seem strangely to have originated in the south of England: there are as many given for Somerset as for the whole of Wales (the Welsh notables, of course, do not include anyone successful only in a Welsh capacity; to warrant inclusion, they must have made it big in London or the Empire, such as Lloyd George, T. E. Lawrence ‘of Arabia’ and H. M. Stanley). And absolutely no one of worth, at least to a Reader’s Digest editor, has ever emerged from Westmorland (the only English county in this ignominious list), Anglesey, Merionethshire, Cardiganshire, Carmarthenshire, Radnorshire, Flintshire, or the old Scottish counties of Wigtown, Kirkcudbright, Berwick, Peebles, West Lothian, Argyll, Bute, Kinross, Stirling, Kincardine, Banff, Nairn, Inverness, Ross and Cromarty, Sutherland, Caithness, Orkney or Shetland.

Of all the things that have most changed in the forty years since the atlas’s publication, the transport routes it portrays are the most pronounced. The infant motorway network comprised only four open routes (the M1 from Watford to Nottingham, the M2 bypassing the Medway towns and Sittingbourne, the M6 from Stafford to Preston and the reverse L of the M5/M50 from Bromsgrove to Ross-on-Wye); an optimistic map of the network to come fills in the gaps. The fact that the M5 and M6 were tarmac reality before the M3 and M4 harks back—as the map so prettily demonstrates—to the original numbering system for British A roads, where the country was divided by spokes radiating out from London. The A1 went straight up to Edinburgh, the A2 to Dover, so that all main roads between the two were numbered A1x or A1xx. The A2s were between Dover and Portsmouth, the A3s a long tranche right to the far end of the West Country, the A4s a giant wedge that took in most of the Midlands and Wales, the A5s everything between the lines from London to Holyhead and Carlisle, and the A6s the remaining backbone of England, back round to the A1. The last three numbers—A7, A8 and A9—are Scottish-only roads that were similarly centred on Edinburgh. I’m half expecting to hear from some indignant Welsh radical demanding a couple of the numbers to be reapportioned to Cardiff.

On the opposite page of this plan for the future is a rather starker image of the past, in the shape of the railway network that, by the mid 1960s, was contracting fast. Much as I squirm at the admission, I know that if I could magically transport myself into another age for a week, it wouldn’t be for a bystander’s view of the Battle of Hastings or the Last Supper, but seven glorious days, probably in May, trundling around Britain’s pre-Beeching railway network. From the very first day of my infatuation with the Ordnance Survey maps of the 1970s, it was the text reading ‘Course of old railway’ that most caught my eye, next to those spectral dashed lines tiptoeing their way across the countryside like the slug trails of history.

Sumptuous though the atlas is, for sheer page-turning wonder to pass the time under my palm tree, the AA’s Illustrated Road Book would probably have the edge as my final desert island choice (spending the rest of my days with a product, however good, of the Reader’s Digest couldn’t possibly be cosmically healthy). The key word is ‘Illustrated’, for the England and Wales book, and its companion tome to Scotland, are dotted with the cutest little pen-and-ink drawings of interesting things to see. Every double-page spread has a gazetteer of towns and villages on one side, and five or six drawings from these places on the other. The England and Wales volume is more than five hundred pages long; there are well over two thousand illustrations. As if that wasn’t enough, the whole country and scores of towns and cities are exquisitely mapped.

In the mid 1960s, ‘places of interest’ were not, for the most part, the things that brown tourist signs point to these days. After all, back then there were no theme parks, designer-outlet shopping malls or fully interactive heritage experiences. Instead, the book presents a dizzying array of interesting houses, churches, memorials, ruins, windmills, stones, bridges, carvings, gargoyles, inns, follies, tollbooths, plaques, graves, wells, even trees, topiary, maypoles and mazes. The illustrators had a particular fondness for unusual signposts, whether pointing down country lanes to oddly named hamlets like Pity Me, Come To Good, Bully Hole Bottom, Pennypot, Wide Open, Cold Christmas, Fryup, Wigwig, Land of Nod, Make Em Rich, New York (Lincolnshire), Paradise, Underriver, Tiptoe and The Wallops, or city street signs such as Leicester’s Holy Bones, Hull’s Land of Green Ginger, and Whip-mawhop-ma-gate in York. Other unusual signs illustrated in the book include a warning of a 1 in 2 gradient on a road outside Ravenscar, one declaring ‘Road Impassable to Vehicles of the Queen Mary Type’ at Bampton in Oxfordshire, and one on the A35 near the kennels of the East Devon Hunt stating ‘Hounds Gentlemen Please’.

It all sounds wonderfully archaic, a feast of nostalgia, but in fact the vast majority of the things featured and illustrated in this substantial book are still there. They may sometimes be a little overgrown or hard to find, but that’s part of the joy in searching them out. I’ve not

found any more up-to-date book that is so comprehensive in its sweep through the weird and wondrous features of the British landscape, and it’s still the first guide book into my camper van when I head off to amble around part of the country, particularly if it’s an area I don’t know too well. It has steered me to many memorable encounters with places and objects that represent the soul of this country, introduced me to some fascinating people and given me countless shivers down my spine as I come face to face with things I half expected to have vanished. That’s the crux of it: this book makes me feel part of a long, unbroken continuum of travellers, pilgrims and folk who just love poking their noses into their own—and others’—back yards to root around for the truffles of our national identity. Many of these pilgrims are long gone, but the spirit of their modest adventure lives on, and it will outlive any of us. I’ve known this book for decades, for my grandparents, both also gone, had a copy that I spent many quiet hours contemplating, and I was overjoyed to find my own in a second-hand bookshop in Presteigne. It still has the price—£8—pencilled on the first page; truly the finest eight quid I’ve ever spent. If I could calculate the number of hours I’ve spent combing its pages, it would easily run into several hundred, yet every time I open it, I still find something brand new that I want to go and see immediately.

The country as captured by the artists of the 1960s AA Illustrated Road Book of England & Wales

Alone on my desert island, the maps, descriptions and little sketches of the country I’d loved and lost would be a terrific condolence. The British landscape, a patchwork of astonishing variety spread over a comparatively small area, is the perfect antidote to any malaise of the spirit; I am sure that for almost any condition of the heart or head, there is a landscape to soothe and calm, or invigorate and inspire. We have a bit of everything, but not too much of anything.

A map reminds us constantly of what is possible, of how much we have seen, and how much we have still to see. This therapeutic longing for place and rootedness has its own word in Welsh, hiraeth, for it is central to the Welsh condition. Homesickness doesn’t quite cover it in English, but what cannot be readily expressed in one word has found ample expression over the centuries in art, literature and music. In the mud and madness of the First World War, it was the poetry of A. E. Housman, invoking an England of foursquare permanence and bucolic tenderness that filled the pockets of the poor bastards in the trenches. From the same war, Cotswold composer-poet Ivor Gurney was invalided back to Britain, eventually cracking under the strain of his own imagination and the horrors that he’d witnessed, and committed to an asylum in Kent. There, he would respond to nothing except an Ordnance Survey map of the Gloucestershire countryside that he adored, had explored so freely, and had written about with such vivid hiraeth. The map was a cipher for all that he loved, the last thread that connected him with life.

Our eternal love affair with our own topography is one of the defining features of being British. Of course, every country has this to some extent, but we have long honed it into an art form and an obsession. It’s the ‘sceptr’d isle’ thing, for even the frankly weird shape of our country is enough to get the juices flowing. The island of Britain is the oddest of the lot: a long, thin, slightly cadaverous outline, yet prone to sudden bulges and protuberances that hint at a fleshy softness and yielding giggle. There are the satisfying semi-symmetries of East Anglia and Wales, Kent and the West Country and the jaws of Cardigan Bay, the raw geology of Scotland’s unmistakeably bony knuckles, the little Italy of Devon and Cornwall. The island of Ireland, that ‘dull picture in a wonderful frame’, with its smooth east and shattered west, sits there knowing all too well that its larger neighbour, entirely shielding it from the European mainland, is going to be trouble.

I used to have a huge map of Great Britain and Ireland on my wall, and invite any visitors to place a pin in it where they felt that they most belonged. Some people plunged in their pins with relish, while others hovered for ages: ‘D’you mean, where I live?’ ‘No, where you feel you belong—it can be where you live if you like, but it doesn’t have to be.’ I loved to watch the mental process going on, the look of wide-eyed wonder as even people who’d never much thought about maps stared hard at the familiar shapes and let themselves mentally patrol the landscape. How differently people perceive the same place is a neverending source of fascination to me. We all have our own prejudices—justified or not—against certain locations, and we’ll go to the grave with them. There is institutional snobbery at work too, for there are, and have been for centuries, two very different maps of the country that reinforce almost every aspect of our history and identity. I call them the A-list and B-list maps of Britain.

The A-list map presents all the places that don’t need to be preceded by an apology: the high and mighty locations that know themselves to be the chosen ones. The map of B-list Britain—where I was born, raised and far prefer to live—covers everywhere else. When I’ve written travel features for the national press, it has always been about places that are firmly on the B-list: Birmingham, the Black Country, the East Midlands, Hull, Glasgow, various parts of Wales and Limerick in Ireland. The pattern has been the same every time. I submit my copy, and get a phone call or email a couple of days later suggesting that the feature needs a new introduction; something along the lines of ‘Well, you thought it was all a bit grim and rubbish, but—surprise!—there’s more to Blah than that these days.’ Sometimes they don’t even bother with the phone call or email, just add it as their own introduction, the generic view of B-list Britain as seen from the desk of a London hack. You see it even more graphically in the newspapers’ property pages: it’s cheap, but—oh dear—it’s Humberside.

Every country has its split, its Mason-Dixon Line; the British equivalent was always held to be one that connected the River Severn south of Gloucester with the Wash on the east coast. South of this diagonal lay the comparatively wealthy, Conservative-voting, whitecollar, Church of England part of the land; to the north, the poorer, Labour-voting, manual-working, nonconformist tribes. The line rippled in places, so that the southern tranche extended to Malvern and Worcester, around Warwick and Leamington Spa, and included the hunting country of Leicestershire, Northamptonshire and Rutland.

Growing up, it was a border I was acutely aware of, for I crossed it every day on the way to school. It was only a 25-minute train journey from Kidderminster to Worcester, but they were in different worlds. Worcestershire is an England-in-miniature in this regard: the county’s favoured images of orchards, cricket and Elgar belong entirely to its more upholstered, southern half. We in the northern triumvirate of Kidderminster, Bromsgrove and Redditch clung to the coat tails of the West Midlands and felt like scruffy gatecrashers in our own county. It was painfully evident at school, which drew its pupils from right across Worcestershire. The kids from Malvern and the Vale of Evesham had dads in Jags and strutted around the place as if they owned it, which they quite possibly do by now. There was never any doubt that they were several cuts above the far fewer of us who spilled off the train every day from Kidderminster, Stourbridge and Rowley Regis, with accents to prove it.

We even name our goods and companies keeping to the strict rules of the A- and B-list maps. This was something that hit me with a slap years ago in an airless undertaker’s parlour, where my mother and I were trying to sort out the arrangements for my grandfather’s funeral. With that sickly, faux-somnolent air they wear while thinking gleefully of all the noughts on your bill, the undertaker slid the catalogue of available coffins under our noses. They were all called the Windsor, the Oxford, the Canterbury, the Westminster and so on. Where, I wondered, were the Wolverhampton, the Barnsley or the Wisbech? Were Scots offered a Stirling or a Brechin in which to cart away their dearly departed?

A-list names conjure up the solid, dependable image that companies are desperate to tap into. Men’s products, in particular, mine the same seam repeatedly, whether in colognes called Wellington and Marlborough (but not, definitely not, Wellingborough), or the Crockett & Jones range of fine footwear—pick from, among others, Tetbury, Chepstow, Coniston, Brecon, Welbeck, Bedford, Chalfont, Pembroke or Grasmere. We buy insurance from Hastings Direct, rather than Bexhill Direct, where the company’s actually based, and smoke smooth Richmonds, not dog-rough Rotherhithes.

We map addicts are the oddest patriots. Maps bring out a curious British nationalism even in those of us normally allergic to displays of flag-waving. Wherever we go in the world, we pick up a local map and our very first thought is, ‘Hmmm, not as good as an Ordnance Survey.’ We feel sure, we know, that our maps are the finest the world has ever seen. Sneaking in there, too, is the certainty that the landscape they portray is also up there with the very best. We have neither very high mountains, nor very deep ravines nor very wild wildernesses, but the scale—like our climate—is modest and comforting, and the scenery often extremely lovely. And all of it so beautifully mapped.

It’s a force that mystifies me, while still it engulfs me: in absolutely no other aspect of life do I feel so resolutely, determinedly, proudly British. I’ve never voted Conservative (or, God help us, UKIP), bought the Daily Mail, sung ‘Rule Britannia’, stood in a crowd to wave at royalty, watched The Last Night of the Proms with anything other than incredulity or so much as cracked a smile at Last of the Summer Wine. Nearly a decade of living in Welsh-speaking Wales has brought me to the view that the UK as a nation-state might well have had its day, and the sooner we realise it, the better all round. And yet, open up an OS, a Bartholomew, a Collins or even—if nothing else is available—an AA road atlas that cost £2.99 from the all-night garage, and something deep within me trembles. That familiar layout and colouring, those tantalising names and the histories they hint at, the shape of those cherished coasts, the twisting tracks and roads, the juxtaposition of the great conurbations and the wild, empty spaces: a few minutes staring, once again, at the map of this island, or any part of it, and I’m stoked up with a love and a loyalty that knows no reason and no limit.

You have to be careful, though. Not only are there the siren warnings of the pioneers who have gone before, and ended up as wizened, cranky obsessives, but such certainty about British superiority can manifest itself in some pretty strange attitudes, if allowed to seep off the map shelf and into almost any other area of life. Britons are routinely encouraged to cling to the idea that they are, inherently, the best at anything, and if not the best, then at least the most worthy, noble or underrated. And if we can’t be that, we’d rather be the absolute worst: cosmically hopeless, the Eddie the Eagle among nations, usually coupled with a graceless sneer when we lose: ‘Pfft, well, we never wanted it, anyway.’ Rarely are we either the best or the worst, but it’s our actual position of mid-table mediocrity that we struggle hardest to cope with.

Though not when it comes to our maps: even Johnny Foreigner grudgingly admits that we’re still world-beaters in cartography. There is no other patch of land on the planet that has been as comprehensively, and so stylishly, measured, surveyed, plotted and mapped as the 80,823 square miles of Great Britain. We might have been late starters in the game, but we’ve more than made up for it subsequently, especially over the past four hundred years—ever since, in fact, we started needing maps in order to go and rough up bits of the rest of the world and declare them to be ours. Again, this is the perverse dichotomy of the British map aficionado: were it not for the Empire and our military bravado, we would be a great deal further down the cartographic rankings. It’s a dilemma to wrestle with, for sure, but boy, are we grateful for the maps.

James Gillray’s map of England as King George III, crapping ‘bum boats’ into France’s mouth

2. L’ENTENTE CARTIALE

We always have been, we are, and I hope that we always shall be, detested in France.

˜ The Duke of Wellington

That our cartography is transparently the best in the world is the battle cry of every British map addict. We wave our OS Landrangers in the same spirit that the English longbowmen at Crécy flourished their state-of-the-art weaponry at the French, confident that we are holding the latest, the most accurate, the loveliest maps known to man. And one single fact underpins this whole fabrication, the slender basis for our patriotic fantasy. We must have mapped the world better than anyone, because every measurement, in all its precision, and the whole grid on which every map depends are taken from a base that passes through—and is named after—an otherwise unremarkable suburb of London. Greenwich Mean Time, and the Greenwich Meridian, the world’s cartographic backbone, is ours.

And we don’t have to put our country’s name on our stamps. Same principle. We were first, therefore we were the best and got special privileges.

Take that République Française, with your overly wordy timbrespostes and your redundant meridian, left abandoned and overgrown like a Norfolk branch line closed in the 1960s. And take that USA, for that matter. You may have superseded us in just about every possible aspect of superpower status, but we’ve still got the maps, the clocks and the meridian. It’s a small victory, granted, but it’ll have to do.

To a junior map addict, who gazes at a British map with the fondness of Rod Stewart at a brand new blonde, the certainty that our maps are so good is buried deep within and breaks out in pustules of xenophobic acne. In the 1970s, watching the TV news, I was genuinely and repeatedly surprised to see how developed the rest of the world seemed to be when it flashed past on a nightly basis. Surely, these places couldn’t be as sophisticated as the Land of Hope, Glory and the Ordnance Survey? When, at the age of six, I first visited my mother after she’d moved to France, I couldn’t quite believe that Paris had traffic lights, zebra crossings, decent shops, well-dressed people—people even fully dressed at all. It was Not England; therefore it was supposed to be dusty and primitive. It looked—whisper it quietly—just like home. Only—whisper it even more quietly—rather better.

Ah, la belle France. Our nearest neighbour, archest rival, flirtiest paramour, oldest, bestest friend and bitterest foe, all rolled into one. We and the French are like an ancient, brackish couple locked into what looks from the outside like the stalest of wedlock, but which, behind firmly locked doors, is as doe-eyed as a Charles Aznavour chorus. We sneer at them, but around eleven million of us make our way over the Channel every year to wallow in their wine, cheese and meats of dubious provenance. They sneer at us, but can’t get enough of our culture, either high, in the ample shape of royalty and aristocracy, or low, from punk to getting pissed properly. We look down on them for their pomposity, their flagrantly over-inflated sense of their own importance, their rudeness, their insularity, their ponderous bureaucracy, their clinging to a long-vanished past, their dodgy new best friends, their fiercely centripetal politics, their all-round unwarranted, swaggering arrogance. They look down on us for precisely the same reasons.

It is this intense neighbourly rivalry between Britain and France that has driven most of the advances in mapping over the past four hundred years—or, more specifically, it is the ever-watchful competitiveness between their two capital cities, London and Paris. These citystates in all but name have been peering haughtily at each other across that slender ribbon of water for the past two thousand years. Both are convinced that they are the epitome of all that is civilised and progressive in this world, and both have so much in common—not least their terribly high opinion of themselves.

It’s a rivalry that endures, even constantly reinvents itself, like a family feud that passes down the generations long, long after the original protagonists are cold in the sod. Some of the finest mapping of its age was the by-product, such as the forensically detailed eighteenth-century invasion plans that each side drew up of the other’s nearest coastline during that hundred years or more of semi-permanent war that existed between the two nations until the 1815 full stop—or rather, semicolon—of the Battle of Waterloo. As the nineteenth century progressed, the arena for mutual Anglo-French antagonism was widened, each side having already flexed its muscles in competing for territories in north America. Now, no part of the globe was immune from the colonisers, with each side racing to capture—and, for the first time, map—lands in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and the Caribbean. The tectonic plates of power were shifting in Europe too, and lavish maps, often with home territories boldly exaggerated or shown as definite possessions when they were little more than statements of ambition, were produced by British and French cartographers in each nation’s struggle to be perceived as the continent’s top dog. France and Britain took the idea of the map as one of the boldest, and most swiftly absorbed, tools of political indoctrination and launched it into the modern era.

Even in today’s much reduced times, the snippiness between London and Paris continues to fuel outbreaks of hubristic condescension on both sides, wind-assisted by maps. Londoners will glower over the maps, drawn up by London County Council, of sobering Second World War bomb-damage, showing the city utterly blitzed and razed in hard-won victory, and could be forgiven for comparing them with their Parisian equivalents, depicting only the lightest of grazes to the city’s elegant face, thanks to its people’s early capitulation to the losing side. Parisians in the 1980s and ’90s loved to brandish their metro map in the faces of any passing Brits, showing as it did the splendid new RER (Réseau Express Régional) lines that scorched across the city like high-velocity darts, while muttering darkly about their last visit to London and memories of chaos on the Northern and Central Lines. And how fitting was it that, once the extravagant French plans and maps had been compared with the more down-to-earth British ones, London squeaked its victory to host the 2012 Olympics over Paris, the long-time front runner and bookies’ favourite?

When it comes to comparing the current standard of our respective national maps, it’s a shockingly one-sided contest, and I’m really trying to be impartial. The French equivalent of the Ordnance Survey is the Institut Géographique National (IGN), and its maps are awful. Leaden, lumpy, flimsy and downright ugly, they are often hard to find, and not worth the bother of trying. The 1:25 000 series, the equivalent of the OS Explorer maps, is an assault on the eyes, with its harsh colours, grim typefaces and lousy printing; they look plain cheap and you’d be hard pressed to work out a decent walk from any of them. The 1:50 000 orange series, the equivalent of our OS Landrangers, with the same problems of garish colours and typographic overcrowding, somehow manages to be even worse. France is larger than Britain, granted, about two and a half times the size, but they’ve carved up the country so ineptly that you’d have to buy 1,146 of these dreadful maps, at a cost of nearly €10,000, to cover the whole country—nearly six times the number of OS Landrangers (204, costing less than £1,500), which would get you the whole of Britain at exactly the same scale and in far greater style. IGN maps at 1:100 000 are not quite as bad, but really, at any scale, you’d be better off in France with the Michelin series, for they are always far more elegant than the government jobs. But still nowhere near as good as You-Know-Who.

At least there’s one area of life where you can always rely on the French, and that’s managing to squeeze a bit of soft porn into the most unlikely topic, even cartography. Back in those innocent pre-internet days, when you had to rely on a late BBC2 or Channel 4 film for a glimpse of flesh, I remember catching one night an early 1970s movie by the name of La Vallée. In English, it was called Obscured by Clouds, after the intriguing caption written over a huge blank space on the map of Papua New Guinea. This, they stated in the film, was an unknown mountainous region, the last place on Earth that had yet to be mapped. A gorgeous young French consul’s wife, Viviane, is in the country to find exotic feathers for export to Paris; she joins an expedition into the unmapped mountains, which soon turns into a phantasmagoria of mind-expanding substances, writhing bodies and an accompanying soundtrack by Pink Floyd. Even at the age of seventeen, I found the idea of the map a far bigger turn-on than a few soft-focus French hippies in the buff.

When it comes to mapping Paris, the ‘us versus them’ contest is a little more equal. Despite endless redesigns, they’ve never managed a metro map with quite the same panache and clarity of the equivalent one of the London Underground. Even when they tried to mimic Harry Beck’s design directly, the result was the proverbial dîner du chien and it was quickly scrapped. With the street maps of the city, however, the French have long since hit on a winner. While the London A-Z and its myriad of near equivalents do the job with postman-whistling efficiency, the little red book that can be found in the handbag of any Parisian (except perhaps for the ones that house small dogs) combine utility with élan. Considering how much the French love to make of their superior sense of style, it’s just as well they’ve got at least one map to prove it.

The little red book—by Cartes Taride, Éditions André Leconte and others—fits Paris perfectly: it’s lightly stylish, full of fascinating detail, slightly bewildering and extremely easy just to lose yourself in. Its art deco titling on the cover, like the classic Métropolitain signs, and its format have been pretty constant since the end of the nineteenth century. The main mapping—colourful, cheerful and crowded—is done arrondissement by arrondissement, with the spill over of the suburbs to follow. There are fine fold-out maps of the metro and the RER, but the fun is only just beginning. Every street in the index—which has those handy A-Z dividers you find in address books—is given its nearest metro station, every bus route is represented by a scaled-down version of the classy linear map that you find on board the bus, with every stop clearly marked, and there are map references, addresses, phone numbers and nearest metro stations given for every police and fire station, government office, embassy, hospital, monument, museum, cinema, theatre, cabaret, railway terminus, place of worship and even cemetery. All contained within something measuring just three and half by five and a half inches.

I may well be biased, for the Paris street atlas is something I’ve known intimately and loved unconditionally for over thirty-five years, ever since my mum moved there. Although it was no fun being the first in class to have his parents divorce, there were definite benefits, regular trips to Paris being a pretty obvious one, especially when the other parent is in a Midlands town that can only be called a capital within the very tight confines of carpet manufacturing. The first time my sister and I went over there to visit Mum, I was terrified; convinced that the law in France demanded that everyone speak French all the time, and that I wouldn’t be able to say a word to her, nor understand anything she said to me. Mum would let me go off to get breakfast from the local boulangerie, sending me out with a ten-franc note and the phrase une baguette et trois croissants, s’il vous plaît drilled into my brain. On the second visit, I’d walk a little further to another boulangerie, then a little further still, until, by the time I was about nine, I’d hotfoot it into the nearest metro station (Porte de Champerret, ligne 3), ride a train or two and collect some bread from whichever random part of the city I surfaced in. Fortunately, my mum and my sister weren’t averse to having breakfast at about eleven o’clock.

My hunter-gathering for bread was beyond excitement: armed with my little red book, I felt such an integral part of this sophisticated city, a tiny corpuscle pelting through the arteries of this statuesque grande dame. It was an intoxicating buzz, one which encapsulated so many of the things that I’ve most come to value: freedom, travel, spontaneity, humanity. For I never felt in any danger—quite the opposite, people couldn’t have done more to help. I was reminded of those happy days when, in April 2008, ‘America’s Worst Mom’ (as she was dubbed by Fox News and the shock-jocks), a newspaper columnist, wrote about letting her nine-year-old son ride the New York subway on his own. America divided down the middle, many cheering her for taking on the media-fuelled paranoia of modern parenthood. They didn’t generate quite as much noise, however, as the half of the country who screamed cyber-abuse at her from within their fortress compounds, while their inert, incarcerated children fantasised about the day they’d go beserk in a shopping mall with a handgun. What about the murderers, they ranted, the muggers, the paedophiles, the gropers, the platform-shovers, the terrorists lurking round every corner? Are you out of your mind, lady? But have they been to New York lately? You’re more at risk walking through Ashby-de-la-Zouch on a Saturday night.

So many years of getting to know Paris made me support her instinctively in the eternal duel with London. Our capital seemed angry and chaotic by contrast, a sensation that only deepened when I lived there for four years at the end of the 1980s, initially at university and then trying to commute every day right across the city for my first job. London during that period was a mess: the glistening towers of Docklands rising fast out of the debris around them, a glassy two fingers to the squalor and poverty, the doorway-sleepers and the disenfranchised. It suited me well, though. Being angry and chaotic myself, London couldn’t have matched me more perfectly. From the lofty heights of my college in leafy Hampstead, I joined every campaign, protest and march, finding myself applauding Tony Benn most weekends at some rally or other in Trafalgar Square. What do we want? Er, student grants, no poll tax, freedom for Nicaragua, Nelson Mandela, Thatcher’s head on a pole…what was it this time? When do we want it? NOW! Two days before the dawn of the 1990s, I left London, smug and thankful that I was quitting this seething metropolis for a return to the safety of the Midlands. Paris was still on its elegant little pedestal in my mind, and I ranted at anyone who’d listen about its vast superiority, and that of France as a whole, over our mean-spirited little Tory island and its yuppie capital. Gradually, though, I fell in love with London all over again, seduced by its energy, its caprice, its sheer balls. One up, one down: the lustre of Paris was peeling, its Mitterand era chutzpah shrivelled into a matronly conservatism.

So many of the advances in cartography, as well as practically every other discipline, have stemmed from the ancient grudge and eternal competitiveness between these two great cities; it is a theme that reappears as the steadiest leitmotif through any analysis of modern maps and mapping. The victory in securing the world’s prime meridian for Greenwich was perhaps our literal high noon in the battle, which came at the 1884 International Meridian Conference in Washington, DC. Delegates from twenty-five nations gathered from the first of October, charged with finally settling the question that was dogging the world’s governments, and its transport and export industries.

Up until then, anyone anywhere could, and did, work to their own meridian. While the Equator is a fixed line of latitude—determined by its position at the centre of an oblate (i.e. polar-flattened) spheroid, its particular climate and the fact that its days and nights are of equal length the whole year round—the defining line of longitude, namely a full circle around the globe that connects the two poles vertically, can be placed anywhere. Establishing longitude was essential for navigation, especially at sea, but also for working out relative time zones. When the sun is overhead at noon in one place, 15° (i.e. 1/2₄ of 360°) west or east it is an hour different. Time was delineated in what might be called the way of the sundial, so that it was noon in any particular place when the sun was highest in the sky. Even in a country as tiny as Britain, this meant that there were numerous different local times in operation. With the advent of the railways, this had to change on a national basis, and soon, thanks to the massive upsurge in oceangoing trade, the need to standardise time zones between countries became acute, especially as there was a plethora of meridian lines being used by different countries.

The 1884 Washington conference came exactly a year after the 7th General Conference of the European Arc Measurement, held in Rome. It was at this geodetic gathering that the French had secured international agreement to use their metre as the global standard unit for measuring length. Their definition of a metre—one ten-millionth of the section of their meridian as it passed over the land between Dunkirk and Barcelona—had been achieved by impeccably scientific means that demonstrated to all the advanced nature of their geodetic powers. Using the line that passed through the Paris Observatory to calculate the metre also subtly cemented that meridian in the world’s consciousness, at a time when calls were becoming ever louder to create one super-meridian, from which all else would be calculated. To decide where that should be was the raison d’être of the Washington conference, twelve short months later. The French must have arrived in America feeling that the prevailing wind was well and truly in their sails.

Not for long, though. There had evidently been some anglophonic stitch-up going on behind the scenes between the host Americans and their British cousins. Use of the Paris Meridian to establish the world’s measuring stick was employed not in advocacy of its adoption as the Prime Meridian, but as a sly argument by the English-speakers against such an eventuality. After all, they cried, it’s someone else’s turn! You got the metre, now be a jolly chap and leave go the damned meridian, won’t you? Of course, the irony should not escape us that this Anglo-American pincer movement, so much of which depended on their reminding delegates of the recent French victory in measuring the world, came from two countries who have had as little to do as possible with the metric system ever since. Even today, the USA remains one of only four countries on Earth officially using imperial weights and measures (it’s an unlikely foursome: the others being Burma/Myanmar, Yemen and Brunei), and with its ever-growing ranks of metric martyrs, save-the-pint campaigners and kilometre refuseniks, it can hardly be said either that Britain has embraced the New (well, 1883) World Order.

At Washington, the French swiftly realised that no one else was going to support the Paris Observatory as the proposed site of the Prime Meridian, so they set about plan B, namely the standard fallback position that, if they weren’t to have the prize, they must do all they could to scupper the chances of the British. We would doubtless have done exactly the same in their tiny shoes. It wasn’t just the French performing beautifully to their own national stereotype: the conference minutes are a quite hilarious catalogue of every nationality living up to its most dastardly clichés. The Americans, swaggering into their role as world-leaders-in-waiting, were bullish, yet smarmy, and masters of manipulation, particularly of the easily flattered British. To that end, the Americans played the good guy, genial hosts with absolutely no self-interest in the process, while shooting across everyone’s bows at the very first session with a clear reminder of their latent muscle. The chairman of the US delegation, Admiral C. R. P. Rodgers, was elected President of the Conference. In his opening address, he declared:

Broad as is the area of the United States, covering a hundred degrees of longitude, extending from 66° 52’ west from Greenwich to 166° 13’ at our extreme limit in Alaska, not including the Aleutian Islands; traversed, as it is, by railway and telegraph lines, and dotted with observatories; long as is its sea coast, of more than twelve thousand miles; vast as must be its foreign and domestic commerce, its delegation to this Congress has no desire to urge that a prime meridian shall be found within its confines.

The minutes do not record if he expounded this while stroking a white cat in his lap.

Rodgers’ statement made clear where the host delegation were to place their support when it came to deciding the location of the Prime Meridian: Greenwich. Indeed, it was only on the second day of the conference that American delegate Naval Commander W. T. Sampson jumped the gun and formally proposed it, stating:

As a matter of economy as well as convenience, that meridian should be selected which is now in most general use. This additional consideration of economy would limit our choice to the meridian of Greenwich, for it may fairly be stated upon the authority of the distinguished Delegate from Canada that more than 70 per cent of all the shipping of the world uses this meridian for purposes of navigation.

The French delegation were horrified, and filibustered the proposal off the table, with a speech by their prime delegate, M. Janssen, the Director of the Paris Observatory, that culminated in his demanding more time to consider the question but which, to reach that point, took well over an hour as he pondered the enormity of the matter in hand. He voiced their opposition to Greenwich in the most tremulously righteous terms:

This meridian, instead of being chosen with reference to the configuration of the continents, is borrowed from an observatory; that is to say, it is placed on the globe in a hap-hazard manner, and is very inconveniently situated for the function that it is to perform…Instead of profiting by the lessons of the past, national rivalries are introduced in a question that should rally the goodwill of all…Since the report considers us of so little weight in the scales, allow me, gentlemen, to recall briefly the past and the present of our hydrography, and for that purpose I can do no better than to quote from a work that has been communicated to me, and which emanates from one of our most learned hydrographers. ‘France,’ he says, ‘created more than two centuries ago the most ancient nautical ephemerides [tables showing coordinates of celestial bodies at particular times] in existence. She was the first to conceive and execute the great geodetic operations which had for their object the construction of civil and military maps and the measurement of arcs of the meridian in Europe, America and Africa. All these operations were and are based on the Paris meridian’. If another initial meridian had to be adopted, it would be necessary to change the graduation of our 2,600 hydrographic plates; it would be necessary to do the same thing for our nautical instructions, which exceed 600 in number.

Although happy to have a good sulk about how much more inconvenient a change of meridian would be for the French than anyone else, Janssen knew well that there was little mileage in further banging the drum for the Paris Meridian, whose cause was already lost. He seized instead on a more nebulous point that, he hoped, would sink the cause of the British, demanding of the conference that ‘the initial meridian should have a character of absolute neutrality…and in particular especially should cut no great continent—neither Europe nor America’. While Britain pretended to be above such squalid argument, their attack-dogs, the American delegation, weighed in with ready answers: ‘The adoption of the meridian of Greenwich has not been sought after by Great Britain,’ Commander Sampson boomed back. ‘It was not her proposition, but that she consented to it after it had been proposed by other portions of the civilised world.’ How very gracious of us: we can only imagine the holier-than-thou expressions adopted by the British delegation at this point. In his opening address, the American Admiral Rodgers had presaged this question of neutrality:

Should any of us now hesitate in the adoption of a particular meridian, or should any nation covet the honor of having the selected meridian within its own borders, it is to be remembered that when the prime meridian is once adopted by all it loses its specific name and nationality, and becomes simply the Prime Meridian.

Absolute horse-shit of course, but high-minded horse-shit of the finest grade. The Americans were really getting the hang of this diplomacy lark.

M. Janssen was the undoubted star of the event, able to turn in grandiloquent speeches, on any topic, that lasted an hour or two. Realising that the neutrality argument was all that lay in the way of the adoption of Greenwich, he worried at it like a starving poodle:

An immense majority of the navies of the world navigate with English charts; that is true, and it is a practical compliment to the great maritime activity of that nation. When this freely admitted supremacy shall be transformed into an official and compulsory supremacy, it will suffer the vicissitudes of all human power, and that institution [the meridian], which by its nature is of a purely scientific nature, and to which we would assure a long and certain future, will become the object of burning competition and jealousy among nations.

Anyone particular in mind, Monsieur?

Professor J. C. Adams, of the British delegation, waspishly replied that Janssen’s ‘eloquent address, in so far as I could follow that discourse, seemed to me to turn almost entirely upon sentimental considerations’, and reiterated the point of practicality, that the most ‘convenient’, i.e. widely used, meridian would make the most sense. He didn’t sully his purity by naming it; he didn’t need to.

In turn, Janssen rebuffed Adams in the politest way possible, while managing a few withering digs at his British counterparts (‘and we are still awaiting the honour of seeing the metrical system for common use in England’). He protested—rather too much—that the French objection was nothing whatsoever to do with ‘national pride’ and questioned the idea of the ‘convenience’ of the Greenwich Meridian. To whom exactly, he postulated, was it convenient? Ah, the Brits and the Yanks: the ‘advantage is to yourselves, and those you represent, of having nothing to change, either in your maps, customs or traditions—such a solution, I say, can have no future before it, and we refuse to take part in it’. He persevered in even darker tones: ‘You see, gentlemen, how dangerous it is to awaken national susceptibilities on a subject of a purely scientific nature.’ Ratcheting up his rhetorical powers, he concluded one particularly long speech with a flourish: ‘Whatever we may do, the common prime meridian will always be a crown to which there will be a hundred pretenders. Let us place the crown on the brow of science, and all will bow before it.’

Janssen’s sterling verbosity was only delaying the inevitable, so, realising that they were backed into a corner, the French hit their nuclear button, issuing veiled threats that they might walk out of the conference and then, when that went almost unnoticed, strident complaints about the standard of translation into their language at the conference. They demanded a recess in order to find a better French stenographer, a process that kept the conference from reconvening for a full further week. When all the delegates reassembled on Monday 13 October, everyone’s positions, after seven days of backstage back-stabbing, had coagulated into immutability.

The French kicked off proceedings by playing what was their only remaining decent card, the demand for the ‘absolute neutrality’ of any chosen meridian. It was put to the vote and heavily defeated by 21 to 3. As a faintly placatory gesture, Sandford Fleming, one of the British delegation, invoked the idea of placing the Prime Meridian 180° from Greenwich, thus, he said, giving it some political neutrality and positioning it largely in the uninhabited Pacific Ocean. The idea didn’t mollify the French at all, who sneered that even if the Prime Meridian was 180° from Greenwich, it was still the Greenwich Meridian in all but name, only in reverse.

This proposal from the British delegation was typical of our fauxhumble demeanour at this stage in the proceedings: it’s easy to be magnanimous when you’re clearly winning, especially in a contest that you’re feigning absolute disinterest in. The British vat of oil to pour on troubled waters was soon generously employed again, as the French and Spanish reminded delegates that their governments fully expected Britain and the USA to join the metric system, if not in a quid pro quo for the adoption of Greenwich, then certainly in the same spirit of global good manners and scientific unity. One of the British delegation, General Strachey, smoothly replied:

I am authorised to state that Great Britain, after considering the opinions which were expressed at Rome, has desired that it may be allowed to join the Convention du mètre…[and] that there is a strong feeling on the part of the scientific men of England that, sooner or later, she will be likely to join in the use of that system, which, no doubt, is an extremely good one.

In other words, we’ll get home and do precisely nothing about it for a century, but thank you so much for your concern. Stuff you with a smile, Monsieur.

The definitive vote on adopting Greenwich loomed, and the French made one last desperate bid to prevent it. The loquacious M. Janssen deferred to his colleague M. Lefaivre to make their final plea. ‘The meridian of Greenwich is not a scientific one,’ piped Lefaivre, ‘and its adoption implies no progress for astronomy, geodesy or navigation.’ It was only ‘convenient’, not scientific, a fact that

our colleague from Great Britain just now reminded us of by enumerating with complacency the tonnage of British and American shipping…Science appears here only as the humble vassal of the powers of the day to consecrate and crown their success. But, gentlemen, nothing is so transitory and fugitive as power and riches. All the great empires of the world, all financial, industrial and commercial prosperities of the world have given us a proof of it, each in turn.

This was the sound of grand nobility in defeat, for the vote was then taken and Greenwich confirmed as the world’s Prime Meridian by 22 votes to 1, with two abstentions. Only San Domingo (the island of Hispaniola) voted against, with Brazil and France abstaining. They didn’t want to look like sore losers. Or rather, they were saving that for later.

After further lengthy arguments about how to calibrate degrees from Greenwich, and how to calculate time zones, the French asked for another deferment of the conference. They returned six days later with a small bombshell of a proposition: that the metric system—which, they reminded delegates, everyone had spoken so voluminously in favour of—should be extended from the measurement of length, volume and weight and into the realms of degrees, angles and time. Greenwich might be getting the line through it, but at least the grid of longitude and the calibration of the day that spun off it might be expressed in a French way, or at least in a way that was guaranteed to piss off the Anglo-American alliance. The British and the Americans cried foul, that such a decision was beyond the remit of the conference.

Style over substance: the Paris meridian

For the first time in weeks, the French smelled English-speaking blood and pressed home their slender advantage, demanding a vote on whether or not a vote could be taken on the topic. It was close. Thirteen countries agreed that the issue of metricising time and angles could be considered; nine, Britain and the US included, voted against. Two abstained. So, as eager not to appear bad losers as had the French been on the Greenwich vote, the Americans and British then ostentatiously supported the metric system in the subsequent vote. In fact, no one voted against it—not that that made the faintest bit of difference in actually making it happen.

Flushed with their pyrrhic victory, the French demanded a further adjournment to the conference, which briefly reconvened two days later before its final adjournment, for nine days, in order that the conference protocols could be drawn up, in English and, of course, in French. On the first of November, a month to the day since the delegates had first gathered, the conference closed in a mutual orgy of back-slapping and vainglorious speeches about how the international community was united as never before and that they had made history. Thankfully, the sagging balloon of hot air was peremptorily pricked by the very last contribution noted in the conference minutes: the ever vocal M. Janssen of the French delegation complaining about the standard of French used in their translations.

As expected, the French reaction to the conference’s decision was to ignore it for as long as they possibly could. The Paris Meridian was still marked as 0° on French maps until 1911, and even beyond that, they kept refusing to refer to the notion of Greenwich Mean Time, preferring instead to name the concept the altogether snappier ‘Paris Mean Time diminished by 9 minutes 21 seconds’. It’s a shame it didn’t catch on: PMT has such an appropriate ring to it for matters of timekeeping. Even though the Paris Meridian has long been shunted into the sidings, the French still keep polishing it and showing it off to the world like a priceless relic. One of their main millennium projects was to plant lines of trees the entire length of France along their old meridian line. It might no longer be functioning, but hey, you could see it from space, or at least if you look closely enough on Google Earth in a few decades’ time. To a chippy Brit (and, when it comes to any dealings with the French, that’s most of us), the project smacked of dismissive looking down the Gallic nose at the lack of presentational flair that attends our meridian line.

The world’s timekeeping and cartographic staff it may be, but as the Prime Meridian enters Britain in the retirement town of Peacehaven on the Sussex coast, it’s marked only by a dowdy obelisk and the Meridian Centre, a deathly 1970s shopping mall with the unmistakable aroma of incontinence. Two hundred and three miles due north, it leaves English soil in similarly dreary fashion, on a beach just south of the Sand-le-Mere caravan park, near Tunstall on the Holderness coast of Yorkshire’s East Riding. Britain’s bleakest coast is also

Substance over style: where the Prime Meridian enters England at Tunstall, East Yorkshire

the fastest-receding in Europe, where houses and roads tumble regularly over the edge, leaving their forlorn traces to be washed over by a freezing sea the colour of a river in high flood. In the circumstances, the great local millennium project—placing a huge carved boulder on the cliff top to mark the point at which the global meridian arrives in its home country from the North Pole—was something of a triumph of optimism over experience. Instead of lasting the full thousand years, it managed just three, disappearing over the muddy cliff in a storm in January 2003. In between these two inauspicious gateposts, as well as the whistles and bells of Greenwich itself, the meridian is marked by a number of plaques, columns, archways and, in Cambridgeshire, a line of daffodils planted by Boy Scouts. It’s either disarmingly modest or just a bit crap. Either way, it’s British through and through.

If—and, frankly, it’s a bloody big if—we accept British pre-eminence in modern mapping owing to the adoption of the Greenwich Meridian as the gold standard for measuring lines on a map, then one event gave birth to this certainty. That was the creation of an earlier imaginary line on the landscape, the first precisely calibrated base line across a stretch of English countryside, from which all initial triangulations were taken to produce what soon became the Ordnance Survey. It took place in the summer of 1784, and for reasons that are also gloriously British: once again, a fierce spirit of one-upmanship against the French and a supremely thin-skinned paranoia that they were insulting us.

We had a lot of making up to do; by the late eighteenth century, French map-making was leagues ahead of that of its clod-hopping British cousin. Nearly a century earlier, their experiments in establishing accurate lines of longitude and latitude had proved that the world was an oblate spheroid, rather than a perfect sphere, which had tremendous impact on the precise measurement of relative distances, radically altering the shape and size of France itself as presented on a map. Coupled with advances in triangulation and surveying, the Académie Royale produced, in 1789, by far the finest and most ambitious cartography that had ever been made of one country: a complete set of 180 maps, covering all of France, at a scale of 1:86 400, just under one and a half miles to the inch. Even the detail on the maps was starkly different: while we were still delineating our upland areas with crude shading or lumpy molehills scattered over the landscape, the French were developing sophisticated systems of hachures—groups of parallel lines to indicate height—before pioneering the use of contour lines on some maps from the 1750s.

The year 1789 is better remembered in France for rather bloodier reasons than the publication of the national map, the Carte de Cassini as it became known, after César-François Cassini de Thury, the Director of the Paris Observatory and its principal progenitor, who had died of smallpox in 1784, leaving his son to continue the work. The new revolutionary government looked with grave suspicion on anything royale, the Académie included, although they were more than delighted with the maps and promptly took over all responsibility for their production and publication. The Académie Royale was closed down (to resurface a few years later as the more egalitarian Académie des Sciences), Cassini junior was imprisoned, while Académie director Antoine Lavoisier was carted off to the guillotine. It was at just this moment in history that the British were starting to get their act together, and, aided by the chaos in France, were soon able to outstrip their neighbours. Though, as ever, it took some pompous prodding by the French to sharpen us up.

That came six years before the Revolution, in the shape of a missive from Cassini de Thury to King George III, in which he loftily pointed out that the world’s two principal meridians, those of Paris and London, were out of kilter in both longitude and latitude. His inference was that, thanks to the superior surveying and triangulation of the French, the mistake was almost certainly on our side of the Channel, and would His Majesty care do something about it? He further rubbed salt into the wounds by pointing out that he himself had checked the trigonometry on the French side all the way up to the Channel coast, and, using a telescope, had established many landmarks on the English side that could be useful if we could be bothered to do a proper survey. The King’s principal Secretary of State, Charles James Fox, passed on the letter to Sir Joseph Banks, President of the Royal Society in London. Many of its members were outraged by the slurs it contained, the Astronomer Royal, the Reverend Doctor Nevil Maskelyne, firing off a hasty rebuttal of the French claims. But there was one Fellow of the Royal Society who received the news with equanimity, bordering on glee, for he knew that this was the chance for which he had been waiting for decades.

We know frustratingly little about Major-General William Roy (1726-90), a map addict of impeccable credentials and the father of the Ordnance Survey. No portrait survives of him, few biographical details have come our way, but, from his plans, letters and publications, we can see a man utterly driven by maps and an insatiable urge to make them ever better. He started in his native Scotland, working with the surveying crews that had been drafted in as a response to the Jacobite uprisings in the Highlands of the 1740s. The official response was the same as always: go deep into enemy turf, build roads and military outposts, move the population to where they could better be tracked, and, most importantly of all, comprehensively map it. For years, this was Roy’s day job, though, as a sideline, he also worked obsessively to map the Roman remains of Scotland, for they had employed much the same techniques in suppressing the clans fifteen centuries earlier. There’s not much doubting what his specialist subject would have been on Georgian Mastermind.

The first survey of Scotland, between 1747 and 1752, was of the troublesome Highlands, when Roy was teamed up with the young Paul Sandby (1731-1809). Sandby, who later became one of the age’s most celebrated landscape painters and a founder member of the Royal Academy, provided the artistic talent for the beautiful maps that they produced, complementing Roy, the technical wizard who worried perpetually about getting the topographical detail correct. Once the Highlands had been comprehensively mapped, it was decided to survey and plot southern Scotland, but Sandby had returned to England by then and the resultant maps were nowhere near as spectacular as the earlier ones of the far north. Roy was a perfectionist, and the lack of precise measuring equipment frustrated him enormously; late in life, he wrote about these early map-making efforts in Scotland, describing them as ‘rather a magnificent military sketch, than a very accurate map of a country’.

From Scotland, Roy enlisted in the army and served with distinction in the Seven Years’ War with France. Once again, his map-making skills, and perfectionism, were usefully employed in his work as a special adviser on troop deployment and strategy. Roy’s reports on such matters included beautifully drawn maps that he always insisted on doing himself, the army draughtsmen and his subordinate officers just not being up to his exacting standards. This lack of trust in anyone else became a growing theme as his career moved towards its apogee.

On his return, he settled in London, and continued rising through the ranks of the army, while spending more and more time on his cartographic pursuits. Central to his ambition was finding the right equipment, or rather, having the right equipment created for his needs. Much of his time was spent experimenting with measuring instruments in order to see how they could be employed to produce the greatest possible accuracy. They were never quite good enough. Nonetheless, his military experiences abroad, and his knowledge of how far advanced the Dutch and French were in such matters, had convinced him that the time was ripe for a comprehensive national survey, and he first approached the authorities about the matter in 1763. With a canny knack for telling the government what he most thought they would respond to, he emphasised Britain’s vulnerability to invasion, particularly along the south coast, and the importance of conducting such a survey ‘during times of peace and tranquillity’, rather than waiting to do it under the chaotic cloud of war. They turned him down on grounds of expense. He re-presented his plans three years later, only to have them refused once again.

Impatient but undeterred, William Roy used every moment of his spare time to conduct his own informal triangulation experiments around London, establishing the position and distance of landmarks in the capital in relation to the Royal Observatory at Greenwich. Triangulation remained the bedrock of map-making until it was supplanted, less than thirty years ago, by satellite Global Positioning Systems (GPS) technology. The principle of triangulation is that if you know the length of one line of a triangle, and two of its angles to the other lines, the entire triangle can accurately be plotted for both distance and elevation. It’s an extremely time-consuming business, depending as it does on caddying heavy equipment up to the highest vantage points: the first triangulation of Britain and Ireland, started by William Roy in 1783, took nearly seventy years to complete.

Roy regularly presented his London triangulation findings to the Royal Society, so that when the inflammatory missive came from Paris in 1783, he seemed the obvious man to restore Britain’s dented honour by conducting the experiment. He was extremely well prepared, for he had used every one of his travels, both at home and abroad, to map the landscape and establish the most suitable places for triangulation. The flat expanse of Hounslow Heath, to the west of London, had long been selected as his preferred choice for the perfect base line. And although the project was nominally to establish only the precise relation of the London and Paris observatories, Roy knew well that it could, and should, be the harbinger of something far greater; that it could ‘extend different serieses [sic] of Triangles…in all directions to the remotest part of the Island’.

William Roy is an undoubted hero to any British map addict, but he is also something of a siren warning to us all. The brilliant young adventurer turned inexorably into a grumpy old man, for whom no one, and nothing, was ever quite good enough. Sounds familiar? I rather fear so. So fixated did he become by his great triangulation project that he picked fights with anyone who failed to come up to his exacting standards, most spectacularly in the case of instrument-maker Jesse Ramsden (1735-1800). Ramsden was just as much of a perfectionist as Roy, and with just as great a cause: his scientific and astronomical instruments attracted customers from across the world to his Piccadilly workshop. Roy’s greatest frustration throughout his map-making career was the fact that the measuring instruments available couldn’t cope with the precision that he demanded. For the great triangulation project of south-east England, Roy commissioned Ramsden to design and build the most exact theodolite ever seen.

Unfortunately, Ramsden failed to employ enough workmen on the project and thus to produce the goods soon enough for Roy, and the cartographer began to cast increasingly bellicose aspersions on the instrument-maker’s professional ability. The massive theodolite—it weighed over fourteen stone and had to be hauled around on a specially designed truck—was the finest ever created, but, to Roy’s continuing chagrin, it was still prone to some tiny errors and, most annoyingly, took a whole three years to build. In fairness to Roy, he was sixty years old and in failing health, so must have felt the continued delays with increasing impatience, urgently wanting to finish the project while he still could. That doesn’t excuse his behaviour, however, as he repeatedly complained about Ramsden to the Royal Society in letters and papers that became ever more dyspeptic. Ramsden, also a Fellow of the Society, responded in kind, so that members found themselves piggies-in-the-middle as complaints and counter-complaints between the two men resounded throughout the Society’s hallowed halls. Roy charged Ramsden with being ‘remiss and dilatory’ and ‘very negligent’; Ramsden whined back that ‘nothing could equal my surprise on hearing the charges brought against me by Major-General Roy…I was the more affected by it as coming from a Gentleman with whom I considered myself in Friendship’. This spat reached its climax in May 1790, when Ramsden demanded that the Royal Society expunge some of Roy’s more colourful slaggings of him from their records. Sadly, William Roy died a few weeks later, the matter still unresolved. It was an acrimonious—and, to us, salutary—end to a brilliant career.

Although William Roy died before the official foundation of the Ordnance Survey in 1791, he was its undoubted progenitor. The event that gave formal birth to the organisation was the re-measuring of the Hounslow Heath base line that Roy himself had first established some seven years earlier. In April 1784, following the French submission to George III, Roy had swiftly secured government backing for the survey and wasted no time in getting on with it. He had at his command twelve Army NCOs and an entire division of the 12th Foot Brigade from nearby Windsor; these he set to levelling and clearing the five-mile-plus route of his line. Having a burly crew of soldiers around was also good insurance; Hounslow Heath in the eighteenth century was the most dangerous location in Britain, and certainly not a place for gentlemen to linger. London and Bath were the two wealthiest cities in Georgian England, and the busy road connecting them ran (as it does still) along the heath’s northern edge. The lowlying ground, with its unexpected fogs, suppurating ditches and numerous copses, was the ideal hiding place for highwaymen and cutpurses, who had rich pickings among the well-to-do on their way to Windsor or the West Country. Contemporary maps show a string of gibbets along the Bath Road across the heath. Many of these would have contained rotting corpses swinging in the breeze, for the policy of the authorities was to return the bodies of those hanged at Tyburn to the place of their misdemeanours, to be displayed to all as a shocking deterrent.

Jesse Ramsden—still, at this point, in Roy’s good books—had made a steel chain exactly one hundred feet in length, together with wooden rods of twenty feet apiece: both were used alternately to calibrate the distance as the party progressed slowly from King’s Arbour Field and across the heath, with the distant witch’s hat spire of Banstead church as their guidance point on the horizon. Work progressed through a monumentally wet summer, conditions that didn’t suit the wooden rods, which were found to expand and contract way too much for accurate measurement. The project ground to a brief halt. Glass rods were commissioned and produced, which required the utmost delicacy as they were hauled across the heath, particularly when it came to crossing the busy Staines Road.

Delays occurred too because the surveying team became something of an unlikely attraction, especially after King George III dropped by on 19 July to see how the work was going: unfortunately, so torrential was the rain that Roy was unable to demonstrate much of their work. The King returned on 21 August and spent two hours examining the team’s work and discussing it with them. This, according to Roy, ‘met with his gracious approbation’. In his wake, all manner of society notables trotted by to see what was going on, and it was left to Sir Joseph Banks, the President of the Royal Society, to erect mobile refreshment and hospitality tents in order to cope with the crowds and to keep them at a discreet distance from the work of the surveyors. The team finally reached their destination, the workhouse at Hampton, on the penultimate day of August. By now, the steel chain had been abandoned and the entire measurement had been made using the glass rods. The base line, announced William Roy, was 27,404.72 feet: just over 5.19 miles long. ‘There never has been,’ he declaimed, ‘so great a proportion of the surface of the Earth measured with so much care and accuracy.’

Three years later, when Ramsden’s theodolite was finally ready, the survey continued, using triangulation to work its way from Hampton down to Dover and the English Channel. The supposed aim of establishing the precise relation of the London and Paris observatories was never quite attained, but the process had, in Roy’s eyes, been hugely successful in his main ambition of showing how poor and imprecise current British maps were and how a national survey was both urgently desirable and eminently practicable. In his final report to the Royal Society and the King in 1789, Roy egged them all on:

The trigonometrical operation, so successfully begun, should certainly be continued, and gradually extended over the whole Island. Compared with the greateness of the object, the annual expence to the publick would be a mere trifle not worthy of being mentioned. The honour of the Nation is concerned in having at least as good a map of This as there is of any Other country.

Such as France, Your Majesty, he might have added. It took less than a year for the authorities to agree and to find the money, but, by then, Roy was dead.

The fogs, footpads and gibbets may be long gone from Hounslow Heath, but the land still has a melancholy tang to it, if only thanks to the fact that so much of it has been eaten alive by Heathrow Airport, located there for precisely the same reasons (vast expanse, flat as a pancake, near London) as Roy’s base line. The airport has swallowed whole villages along the northern part of the line, its route south-east has been filled in with shops, factories, houses, roads and all the normal suburban detritus of the outskirts of London. The line, dotted across field and factory, and marked portentously as General Roy’s Base, used to appear on OS maps up until the early twentieth century, though not since. Strangely, the northern end of it at Heathrow is labelled, on the current OS 1:25 000 Explorer map, with the supremely wordy ‘Cannon: West End of General Roy’s Base (site of)’; although the cannon is firmly there in precisely the spot indicated, there is nothing ‘site of’ about it. The other end, at Hampton—which is far easier, and more pleasurable, to find—doesn’t even warrant that, and goes completely unmarked.

Trying to trace the line today, I was reminded of the late Linda Smith’s immortal observation that Greater London was something of a misnomer, for ‘the further you get away from the middle of it, London doesn’t really get greater—it’s more Lesser London’. She came from Erith (‘not so much the city that never sleeps, more the town that lies awake all night staring at the ceiling’), which sits crusted on the rim of the capital in much the same way as Feltham, Bedfont and Hanworth, the sprawls that now cover William Roy’s historic line. There are other invisible lines to contend with here: these undistinguished, indistinguishable towns are firmly on the other side of the tracks from leafy Hampton (as in Court), where Roy’s measurement ended. This lies in that weird little south-western corner of Greater London, the Twickenham-Richmond triangle: smug and tweaked, embarrassed Tory so voting LibDem, death by bungalow and leylandii.

After Major-General Roy conducted his experiments, wooden posts were interred in the ground at either end of the recorded base line as a memorial. In 1791, eleven months after Roy’s death, the party led by the Duke of Richmond, charged with re-measuring the line for the Board of Ordnance, found that the posts were rotting and so they were replaced by upended cannons. There, wondrously, they still remain. Both cannons have seen untold change unfold around them over two centuries. The southern one, at Hampton, witnessed the demolition of the borough workhouse nearby; it thence lived in an area of open ground known as Cannon Field until Twickenham Borough Council built housing estates on it in the late 1940s. At least they left the cannon intact and had the good grace to name the two nearest culde-sacs Roy Grove (where the cannon can be found sat in a grassy gap between two post-war semis) and Cannon Close (which, indeed, it is). This is Hampton as the acme of suburbia, so much so that the street opposite is Acacia Road.

Handily, there’s a bus—the 285 Kingston-on-Thames to Heathrow—that almost precisely connects the two cannons, taking a route that’s only a little over a mile longer than William Roy’s 5.19-mile straight line. The good general wouldn’t recognise it these days. The bus coughs its way up the Uxbridge Road and into Feltham, doing a quick detour into the Sainsbury’s car park, and passing forlorn-looking light industrial estates, the Clipper Cutz hair salon, the Chirpy Chaps barbers, Cindy’s Nail Bar, Fryday’s chippy, a Subway or two, the A3 roundabout and parades of Metroland semis displaying either a St George’s flag or a ‘No To Heathrow Expansion’ sticker, sometimes both (albeit quite hard to see through the triple glazing).

I broke my journey at Feltham, in order to take a look at another oblique memorial to William Roy, an eponymous modern pub off the High Street. This, it claims, is named after him because of its position more or less halfway along his historic line, although it’s stretching things slightly, as the General Roy pub is nearly a mile to the south of the route. There’s nothing there to indicate its homage to Roy, save for one old map of the district on the wall, showing the Feltham area as a bucolic cluster of villages, before they were entirely obliterated by the spreading gut of the capital and its main airport. The pub is pitched at workers from the nearby industrial park, home to something glassy and chromey called the Feltham Corporate Centre—a name to strike even greater terror into the loins than the town’s rather better-known Young Offenders’ Institution.

From Feltham, the 285 fairly closely follows the route of the base line north-west towards Hatton Cross and Heathrow. Even without the growing taste of diesel in the air and the ear-splitting screams of the jets overhead, you’d know that there’s a major airport coming up. It dominates everything, especially when the tired, tatty—and increasingly impossible to sell—houses finally give way to the dispiriting landscape of international aviation: the pavement-less roads clogged with traffic, the giant hangars, mysterious metal buildings housing anything from security firms to haulage companies, car parks galore, miles of razor wire, CCTV whirring and winking in every direction and a collection of hotels that no one, surely, has ever spent a second night in.

Heathrow Airport only came into existence thanks to government sleight-of-hand at the end of the Second World War. The site, on the richest agricultural land in the country, was commandeered under Emergency Powers in 1943, purportedly for the RAF. It was never used as such. The then Under-Secretary of State for Air, Harold Balfour, revealed in his autobiography that the requisition and construction work undertaken were entirely bogus, and that the plans had always been to turn the airfield into London’s principal civil airport come the end of hostilities. Playing the national emergency card simply allowed the authorities to circumvent any normal planning procedures—and so the pattern continues.

Even Major-General William Roy fell foul of the airport zealots’ economy with the truth. When the never-to-be-used RAF base was being built in 1944, the memorial cannon that marked the north-western end of his base line was removed, in a theatrical attempt to demonstrate that no impediment—even one just five feet tall—should be placed in the way of our magnificent men in their flying machines. Sense eventually prevailed, and the cannon was returned in 1968, and finally replaced in its original position four years later, where it still squats. It’s not easy to locate: indeed, the irony is that you need a bloody good map to find it. Tucked away in a grassy corner nibbled out of a long-stay car park, the cannon sits alone and unloved, overlooking the airport’s main police station and the northern perimeter fence. You’d hardly notice it, especially compared with the huge banner that hangs off the car park fence above it: ‘Exclusive Parking: Park Today. Complimentary 15 Minute Spa Treatment’—well, who wouldn’t want a rub down from a car park attendant? In Paris, you suspect that a monument this significant would have been turned into a vast pyramid, visited by coachloads of schoolchildren by day and extravagantly flood-lit by night.

I paused, gulped down a little more airborne diesel, and felt strangely proud of the British way.

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