Читать книгу Map Addict - Mike Parker - Страница 10
ОглавлениеThe original index map for the OS 1:50 000 series: there’s Aysgarth, but no Sheffield
Ordnance Survey maps in all their shapes and sizes are the most beautiful manifestation of twentieth-century British functional design. Ever since I can remember, I have spent stolen moments, wasted evenings and secret hours studying the mystery and beauty of the Ordnance Survey maps of these islands. The concrete trig points that had originally been used in their creation became almost as powerful in mystical properties for me as standing stones.
˜ Bill Drummond, 45
Grimsby and Cleethorpes. Could there be a more inauspicious debut to a lifetime’s obsession? It was 1974 and the Ordnance Survey had just published its first swathe of new 1:50 000 maps, the metric replacement for the longstanding, much-loved one-inch system that had divided the country since the very first map in 1801. Whether it was their eye-catching colour (a goutish pinky-purple) or stark 1970s visual functionality, I don’t know, but as soon as I saw the new maps in W. H. Smith, I was hooked. I wanted them, and before I discovered how easy they were to steal, I was even prepared to save up my pocket money to get them. The going rate in our family was 2p for every year of your age, earning me a princely 14p every week. The maps were 65p each, so it took some saving—and some serious creeping to grandparents.
The 1:50 000 series (the ‘Landranger’ title only appeared in 1979) is the best range of general-use maps in the world. The whole of Great Britain is carved into 204 squares, each one a 40 × 40 km portrait of its patch of land. The variety is breathtaking: from map number 176 (West London), which is covered in the dense stipple of cheek-by-jowl population, covering the homes of perhaps 4-5 million people, to map number 31 (Barra & South Uist, Vatersay & Eriskay), where nine-tenths of the map is pale blue sea, and the rest just a few straggling islands of the Outer Hebrides, home to no more than a couple of hundred hardy souls.
I love every aspect of these maps: the clarity and efficient good sense of their colour scheme, their neat typography and lucid symbolism, the fact that they are at precisely the right scale to include every lane, track, path and farmhouse, every nodule and bobble of the landscape, yet cover a sufficiently large area to afford us a one-glance take on the topography of a substantial part of the country. Even the 1970s cover plan, a stylised square summarising the area to be explored within, has a pleasing visual economy, the size of the settlements upon it indicated by the depth of boldness of the type: darkest for the largest towns through to ghostly light for the villages. In the early days of the new series, before the marketing men decided to plaster the cover with a tourist board shot of somewhere on the map, the cover plan filled the map’s purple front: bold, clean and perfectly in keeping with the times. A lifelong OS collector-turned-dealer told me of the ‘moment of conversion’ that ignited his passion on unfolding a One Inch map for the very first time nearly half a century before, his captivation with the beauty and elegance of an Ordnance Survey map. Most OS aficionados can remember their own such moments of epiphany, when a lifetime’s love was, in an explosive moment of clarity, mapped out before them. And so very well mapped, at that.
The modernist mania for streamlining was evident in the new 1:50 000 map series, and not just in the cool lines and clear typeface of the covers. One of the all-new features of the maps was that everything was metric. The old one-inch (to one mile) scale, itself a masterstroke of simplicity, translated in metric terms to the rather more cumbersome 1:63 360. Expanding the scale slightly meant that the maps looked less crowded, and that each grid square, an orderly 2 × 2 cm, represented one kilometre. Not that you ever heard anyone refer to them as the ‘2 cm to 1 km’ series. It was—and is still—the ‘one and a quarter inches to the mile’.
Contours had to be translated into metric measurements too, and this produced one of the series’ daftest anomalies that remained obstinately in place for years, until the whole country’s height differentials could be re-surveyed and re-plotted at ten-metre intervals. As the key next to the map put it: ‘Contour values are given to the nearest metre. The vertical interval is, however, 50 feet.’ In other words, contours were merely renumbered metrically, making the gap between them a decidedly forgettable 15.24 metres. Thus, instead of a hill rising through 50, 100, 150, 200 feet and so on, it was now growing through 15, 30, 46, 61 and 76 metres. Things got even sillier the higher you went. Then there was the potential confusion in some of these odd contour measurements: 61, 91, 168, 686, 869, 899, 991 and 1,006 metre lines could all be misread upside down. Therefore it was decreed that such figures could only be placed on contours on the south-facing slopes, so that the numbers would be the right way up. As a result, you had to follow your finger round an awfully long way on some of the hills, the higher ones in particular. That said, anyone who thought that there were contour lines of 9,001 metres to be found in Britain should have been banned from going anywhere near a map.
There were very few contours on Grimsby & Cleethorpes, 1:50 000 map number 113. This really was the very first map that I frittered away my pocket money on, at the tender age of seven. I took it into school, hoping to impress everyone. Unsurprisingly, the ploy failed; as I unfurled the portrait of distant Humberside to a small crowd, there was puzzled silence and then a small voice piped up, ‘So where’s Kiddy on that, then?’ The realisation that others failed to share my enthusiasm, or even to understand the concept that there was a whole big country out there that Kidderminster wasn’t a part of, was crushing, but it didn’t deter me. Before long, I’d saved up for my second OS map, right down the other end of England, number 189 (Ashford & Romney Marsh). I wasn’t especially interested in seeing close-up details of my own neck of the woods, or even any of the places that I knew. Thirtyfive years later, I’ve still never been to Grimsby, Cleethorpes or Ashford, but they were the first places I wanted to scrutinise on the map, to wander around in my febrile imagination.
Hard though it may be to believe, those first two maps represented a glimpse of the exotic. And it was a very specific kind of exoticism that appealed to me. Even at that early age, I had become fascinated by endof-the-world places and communities, set at the far end of bumpy tracks and sliding lethargically into the sea under lowering, leaden skies. Part of it was undoubtedly the call of the ocean. The sea holds a very specific place in the psyche of a Midlander. When you only see it once or twice a year, and that’s when you’re on holiday and there are endless ice creams and amusement arcades to accompany it, even the steely Scarborough briny comes to represent all that is exciting, infinite and free.
Of all the 11,073 miles of British coastline (19,491 if you include the offshore islands), the two areas that I first chose to own by proxy of a map seem strangely perverse, even now and even to me. This is not the Kiss Me Quick seaside; more the Wring Me Out and Leave Me For Dead coastline. But each of those first two maps held one feature that enthralled my besotted mind. On the Grimsby & Cleethorpes map, it was the long spit of land known as Spurn Head at the mouth of the River Humber, while on Ashford & Romney Marsh, it was the ethereal swell of marsh, bog and nuclear power station known as Dungeness. Spurn Head and Dungeness. Even the names sound vaguely suicidal.
Hours I spent poring over those obscure corners of this island. Nowadays, a precocious seven-year-old with similar tastes would merely tap the names into Google, and find himself presented almost immediately with galleries of images and reams of facts. Nothing so instant in 1974. It was left to my overheated mind to create images of these weird-looking landscapes. On the map, the lack of contours, the ruler-straight lanes and irrigation ditches, the banks of shingle and the odd names all conjured up a misty melancholy seeping over the bleak countryside like an unseen plague. Back in my Midlands bedroom, I hugged these unknown, unknowable places to my chest and swore that one day I’d get to meet them.
Spurn Head I managed to tick off my list decades ago, although it took until very recently to make it to Dungeness. My love affair with end-of-the-world landscapes has continued into adulthood, and, in my twenties, I was fortunate enough to have a good friend who shared this strange passion. Jim and I would borrow a car for the weekend and head off to places whose sole criterion for us was that they just looked weird on the map. Hours we spent poring over my OS collection, trying to find just the right balance of oddities in any one place. Hence the Isle of Thanet, the Suffolk coast, Portland, the Forest of Dean, the Wash, the Isle of Wight and the Humber estuary all came under our critical gaze at some point or other. Best were those places that not only afforded the opportunity to look out over marsh and mudflat, but also gave us the chance to hang out in its dead-end urban twin, the out-of-season British seaside resort. Thus Skegness was a great base for the Wash trip, Thanet gave us chance to be depressed by Margate long before Tracey Emin gentrified it, and Bridlington was a superbly moribund HQ for that ultimate trip to my long-awaited paramour, Spurn Head.
