Читать книгу Map Addict - Mike Parker - Страница 7

‘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.