On The Map: Why the world looks the way it does

by Garfield, Simon

  The map, at a scale of 100 feet to an inch (1:1200), was first sold in January 1677, and its publication was a major event, comparable with John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress the following year. It was printed on twenty sheets, ideally to be backed and joined by linen, giving an overall size of 8ft 5in by 4ft 7in. In geographical extent, too, it was ambitious, extending from Gray’s Inn and Lincoln’s Inn in the west to Whitechapel in the east, and from Upper Moorfields in the north to the bank of the Thames. It was entitled ‘A Large and Accurate Map of the City of London Ichnographically Describing all the Streets, Lanes, Alleys, Courts, Yards, Churches, Halls and Houses, &c Actually Surveyed and Delineated.’ (An Ichnographic map was typically one that showed a realistic plan rather than a bird’s eye drawing.)

  London 1677, mapped by Ogilby and Morgan after the Great Fire, ‘beyond whatever has been attempted for any city of the Universe’. A detail from the map showing St Paul’s. The numbers refer to the most detailed index yet to accompany a London map (or indeed any single map of the time).

  A fair amount of credit for the new map should go to Ogilby’s step-grandson, William Morgan, who succeeded him as royal cosmographer and improved the map in subsequent editions. Their work, the most complete and historically significant survey of the capital to date, set a new benchmark in accurate mathematical cartography of cities. The plotting of individual houses and their backyards had not previously been publicly available, and although the level of detail was still far from the standard we would come to expect from Ordnance Survey, Ogilby’s map was perhaps the first to perform the one duty we have come to expect from all city maps since – it enabled visitors to find their way around.

  Running one’s finger across its dense hatching and graphite tension today, one still experiences excitement. The streets are wider, the Fleet river is dredged and serviceable again, the city just looks cleaner. In fact, it looks like the sort of model metropolis that architects of today might offer a new client, with agreeable mixed-use housing and green spaces. It is a place of boundless opportunity, all clarity and defined rectangular boundaries. The pastures, free of cattle and ordure, appear just the spot for the Sunday stroll; Billings Gate Dock stands quiet by London Bridge, awaiting cargo. We know from bawdy Restoration theatre that London was exploding with slums, squalor and assault at this time, but the only clue is from the lengthy index that Ogilby and Morgan supplied in a separate booklet: Hooker’s Court, The Fiery Pillar, Scummer Alley, Dagger Alley, Pickaxe Alley, Dark Entry, Slaughter Yard. Sadly, Gropecunt Lane, a popular late-night venue in many British cities in the century before Ogilby was born, does not appear.

  And not everything is quite right: St Paul’s, shown as an outline, was probably based on one of Wren’s early sketches rather than the final plans (it is highly likely that Ogilby and Wren knew each other from the Covent Garden coffee houses; it was where the future of the post-destruction city took on its most collaborative and practical shape). And the depiction of the Thames Quay as an attractive river frontage comparable with other European cities was wishful planning and was never realised (or at least, not until the Docklands boom of the 1980s).

  But the way this landmark map looked spread out on a table – the impression it gave – was its greatest achievement. It was accurate, and it set a high watermark in civic pride. It reflected what Ogilby had observed when work on the map began, that the swift transformation of London after the fire was a ‘Stupendious Miracle!’ He saw how the ‘Raising from a Confused Heap of Ruines’ had occurred ‘sooner than some believ’d they could remove the Rubbish.’ One can see why Charles II and his courtiers were so supportive of his work: with its broader streets, with its hungry Thames and new docks, the map announced to the world that London was open for business again.

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  And if you were tired of London, then John Ogilby could also help you leave it. His great survey of the capital was only a part of his grander Britannia project, an undertaking that almost bankrupted him. His ambitions – to produce a huge atlas of England that would show each town and county in great detail – had to be scaled down when the enormity of the task became clear. But what remained of the scheme was far more original, and it was something that would prove his most famous, beautiful and covetable legacy: the strip map.

  As with his map of London, Ogilby wished to improve the lot of the traveller; or at the very least he saw profit in enabling his wealthy patrons to travel the country’s perilous roads in the most direct and hospitable way. His solution was the earliest form of popular road atlas, a collection of one hundred lavishly designed route maps, engraved on copper-plate and printed on heavy paper, intended both for practical coach travel and domestic adornment.

  At their simplest, they would guide the traveller from London to Abingdon in Oxfordshire, and then (on another map) from Abingdon to Monmouth in Wales. Yet another London strip set off north-easterly towards Cambridgeshire, taking in Waltham, Hoddesdon, Ware, Royston and Huntingdon before ending at Stilton. Plate 6 took you to Tuxford in Nottinghamshire, Plate 7 from Tuxford to York, Plate 8 from York to Chester-le-Street in County Durham, and Plate 9 from here to Berwick, just south of the Scottish border.

  Fourteen of the strips began in the capital. You would set off at point A, and know that en route you’d encounter various staging posts, marshes, rivers, inns, churches, coal pits, arable fields and all manner of what Ogilby called ‘scenographical ornaments’. They prepared the traveller, coachman and prospective highwayman as never before. It was now possible to read the distances and calculate where to stop for a meal or a night robbery.

  The maps were extraordinarily accurate. A surveyor had actually gone out with a measuring wheel and walked each route, accompanied by a colleague on horseback carrying supplies. Ogilby insisted on high levels of factual information on each map. He standardised the measurement of the mile, setting it at 1,760 yards rather than the shorter Roman mile of 1,617 yards or the longer ‘old English’ mile of 2,428 yards. Each mile was clearly marked on the strip (at a scale of one inch to the mile). The maps would also show steepness and degrees of arduousness in the form of a pyramid of hills, each pointing in the direction of gradient.

  A long pleasant scroll to the West Country: a detail from John Ogilby’s route from London to Cornwall.

  One of Ogilby’s biggest cheerleaders in this project was the great Restoration polymath Robert Hooke, the ‘curator of experiments’ at the Royal Society who had also conducted surveys of London after the Great Fire. In many of his previous projects Ogilby was content to repackage existing maps, adding only the flourish of a new cartouche or border; there were already valuable topographic and archaeological studies of Britain by William Camden and John Leland, and they would have been easy to reproduce and elaborate. But Hooke encouraged him to make something entirely novel.

  The strip maps were more than useful. They looked stunning and they were fun – not unlike a spotters’ game to keep children diverted on an interminable car journey. Here was a bridge, and not long to go now before there’s a windmill, and only three miles before we’re at the Old Red Lion. To modern eyes, each of the strips resembles a spinning barrel on a fruit machine, with most of the symbols recurring frequently (compasses, clumps of trees, churches), while others (a custom house, a castle) appear only as special attractions. They employed an intricately shaded trompe l’oeil effect, wherein each map looked as if it was written on a slim paper scroll, with the imaginary excess of the paper pleated at the back. Ogilby knew he was onto something. When the strips were complete, he suggested it would be ‘bold to challenge the Universe for a Parallel,’ for ‘nothing of this nature requiring so vast a Charge and such infinite Labour and Disquisition was ever yet Attempted or even Thought of …’

  Expensive editions would be hand-coloured, which made them desirable objects to hang on a wall, one reason why so many of the atlases were broken up and maps removed for local interest; the other reason was that travellers would undertake one sp
ecific route and saw no reason to take the rest of the country with them as they went. Within a year there would be smaller, cheaper editions, including ‘Ogilby Improv’d’ and ‘The Pocket Book of Roads’, and Ogilby complained to no avail that he was being pirated by printers all over London ‘who Have Rob’d my Book.’

  It turned out to be the least of his problems. In 1676, shortly after his strip maps began escorting the English to places they had never been before, Ogilby died, at the age of seventy-six. He was buried in the vault in the ‘Printer’s Church’ of St Bride’s on Fleet Street, not long after Wren had completely rebuilt it after the Great Fire. And there he lay until 29 December 1940, when he was blown to bits as the next great reconfiguration of London was made necessary by the Luftwaffe.

  Chapter 10

  Six Increasingly Coordinated Tales of the Ordnance Survey

  On 3rd and 4th December 1790, the first ever map auction took place at Christie’s in London’s Pall Mall. The lots included a map of London at the time of Queen Elizabeth, many privately-commissioned surveys of the English counties, recent coastal maps of North America, twenty-odd maps of Scotland (including several unfinished manuscript proofs), and seventy-eight sheets of the Cassini family’s map of France. The sale also included a valuable selection of books: a good smattering of travel writing, including recent volumes on the interior of Africa and Captain Cook’s last voyage towards the South Pole, and an extensive range of specialist books about mathematics and surveying, many of them published in France the decade before, including Cassini de Thury’s Description Géométrique de la France and Cagnoli’s Traite de Trigonometrie.

  And then there was what the auction catalogue called ‘A Capital Collection’ of engineering and measuring instruments, which was also a great rarity for an auction house at this time (Mr Christie, as the sale catalogue had him, had only established his business in the 1760s). The lots suggested a life of curiosity and adventure: there were many quadrants, sextants, compasses and barometers, there were theodolites and telescopes, ‘a four eye glass perspective’ and a four-foot achromatic telescope made by the optics dynasty of John and Peter Dollond (150 years before they met Aitchison; Admiral Nelson also owned a Dolland). Then there were delineators, thermometers, plotting scales, a portable camera obscura, a Gunter’s chain and something listed as ‘a small electrical machine’, whose purpose was unknown.

  Every tool but the Gunter’s Chain: theodolite and waywiser at work in the eighteenth century.

  But who once owned these things?

  They were the property of General William Roy, who had died five months before, and were the tools of the trade of the man who effectively invented the Ordnance Survey. The project he inspired mapped not only the entire contents of Great Britain – every orchard, each bracket, every saltmarsh and saltings, at a scale and thoroughness hitherto thought impossible – but also reshaped British understanding and appreciation of its landscape, its property boundaries, its urban and rural planning, engineering, archaeology, district and tax laws. The mapping of Great Britain was, initially, a project of more than sixty years, and it resulted in, effectively, a cartographic Domesday Book. It almost defined Britain and – just before the birth of the railways, and long before the BBC and the National Health – it became the envy of the world.

  Does it continue to be indispensable? Stuck out on a Peak District promontory in all weathers you may still think there is nothing like it on God’s blue-green planet. And you would be right.

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  The great Trigonometrical Survey of the Board of Ordnance began officially in June 1791. Prior to this date it is sometimes imagined that the country was hardly mapped properly at all, a blur of ploughed field and wayside inns broken by early stirrings of industrial sprawl. In fact, the opposite was the case – though compared to the rigour of the OS, it was cartographic anarchy.

  By the dawn of the eighteenth century, the London survey and country strip maps made by John Ogilby were long out of date – and the county maps of Christopher Saxton and John Speed even more so. But Britain had become obsessed by mapping. From the 1750s on, a great many people were out at all hours with their Gunter’s chains and their eyepieces, creating maps for commercial or land interests, or assessing tax liabilities (‘cadastral’ maps). Prominent (and accurate) county surveys were also conducted by expert plotters such as Carrington Bowles, Robert Sayer and John Cary. But each of these maps was particular to the demands of its patrons. Many of the maps were symbols of influence, coverage was patchy, and there was no agreement over what was included or ignored. Nor was there any standardisation of scale or symbols (though a church was denoted by a spire, and one horizontal bar signified a parish church, two an abbey, three an archbishopric).

  The shift to national mapping was driven by one principal concern: military defence. In Scotland, the Jacobite Uprising of 1745 alerted troops loyal to the British government of the need for accurate mapping of Highland terrain far beyond the previous concentration on castles and other fortresses. And thus, under the leadership of a lieutenant-colonel named David Watson, General William Roy began a new survey of Scotland from 1747 to 1755, creating maps on a scale of 1000 yards to an inch, something he later considered ‘a magnificent military sketch [rather] than a very accurate map of a country.’ Much of it, indeed, was conducted from observations on horseback, and although there had been considerable improvements in measuring instruments (not least telescopes and theodolites made in England and Germany), it was still far from the rigorous mapping that Roy would advocate in the years to come.

  His inspiration for such systematised mapping came from France. Beginning in 1733, the great national French survey took twelve years to produce a set of maps which, if not the most decorative to have emerged from Europe in this period (Prussia under Frederick the Great may stake a claim to that), was an exemplar that would soon have an impact as far away as India and America. The cost (labour, administration and printing) was almost certainly the greatest ever for a national mapping project, but its value exceeded it.

  The 182-sheet Carte de France (78 sheets of which would sell at Roy’s auction) was first published in 1745. It was the work of the Cassini family, backed by Louis XV, and majestic in scale. The maps could be pasted together to form a collage with a width and length of some 11.5 metres (they were also available as a bound atlas). The survey played an important role in establishing a fiscal framework for the new French state, and – improved by four generations of Cassinis up until 1815 – provided something of a topographic constitution during the country’s endless European wars. It would be easy now to regard such a thing as an obvious step in a nation’s cartographic progress, but at the time it was a geographic miracle. As the American cartographic historian Matthew Edney puts it, ‘Such high-quality surveys were the period’s equivalent of atomic science.’

  The first of the great map surveys – the Cassini family’s Carte de France, created between 1733 and 1815.

  Certainly, the Ordnance Survey owes its French relative an immeasurable debt. The Carte de France was based upon an enhanced system of triangulation, the system of calculation that determines distance by establishing two angles measured from a fixed baseline. The method was popularised in the sixteenth century by the Dutch cartographer Gemma Frisius, although it is a theory that would not have been unfamiliar to Pythagoras.

  The British Ordnance Survey would rely on triangulation for all its work until GPS took over almost two hundred years later. William Roy first championed it in 1763, when, in his role as Deputy Quartermaster-General, he proposed a triangulation of the whole country at one inch to the mile. He made a similar proposal two years later when he became an inspector of coasts for the Board of Ordnance, a branch of the military based at the Tower of London that was concerned with armament supply and other logistics (including maps) to the army and navy. Roy argued for more detailed maps to protect the south coast, although he also wrote about how such a plan could be extended with a meridia
n line ‘thro’ the whole extent of the island, marked by Obelisks … like that thro’ France.’ His plans were dismissed on the grounds of time, labour and cost.

  Roy finally got his chance, however, in 1784, when he was commissioned by George III and the Royal Society to conduct a triangulation to link the observatories in Greenwich and Paris (the initial impetus came from the Cassini family). It took three years to cross the Channel from Dover, the project delayed by what appears to have been the procrastination of the chief London instrument maker Jesse Ramsden. It was Ramsden’s three-foot-high ‘Great Theodolite’ that was key to the accuracy of the work, but according to the historian R.A. Skelton, Roy became so irritated by Ramsden’s deliberating over measurements that he damned him in his official report – expletives that were removed before printing.

  An early illustration of triangulation from the 1550s

  Notwithstanding, the work was deemed a success, and a triumph for triangulation. Roy had again written of his ambitions for a national survey in two reports for the Royal Society, the last composed a few weeks before he died in 1790. Around this time he also wrote to one of his principal supporters, the Duke of Richmond, the Master General of the Ordnance, and it was the Duke who commissioned what we now recognise as the Ordnance Survey the following year.

  The fact that French troops were gathering strength in Europe certainly helped his case for surveying the coasts. But in Roy’s words, the plan was to use ‘the great triangles’ to survey not only vulnerable areas or ‘Forests, Woods, Heaths, Commons or Marshes,’ but also ‘in the enclosed parts … all the Hedges, and other Boundaries of Fields’. Roy believed that this could not be achieved on a scale of less than two inches to a mile, although they could be reduced when printed to one inch to a mile ‘for the Island In general.’