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

by Garfield, Simon

  The first part of the island to be measured was the base at Hounslow Heath that General Roy had used for the Anglo-French work (a location near what was to become Heathrow Airport). This then extended to Surrey, West Sussex, Hampshire, the Isle of Wight and Kent. As with so many great ideas, it would be fair to assume that all who pored over it in the weeks and months that followed must have wondered why no one had thought of making such a thing before.

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  The Ordnance Survey arrived in Ireland in the autumn of 1824, and immediately ran into a problem: impenetrable fog. In England, mists that were present at dawn were usually gone by mid-morning, but this was not the case in Donegal, Mayo and Derry. The Irish survey began as a systematic attempt to reform the Irish taxation system by measuring the boundaries of some 60,000 rural ‘townlands’, but it soon developed into a scheme that mapped the country from north to south at six inches to the mile. An astonishing amount of men were employed in this exercise – more than two thousand at its peak in the 1830s – but there was one man who made their employment feasible, their output prodigious and their visibility possible, and like William Roy he was a Scot.

  One of the original Ordnance Survey maps – Kent, mapped at one inch to the mile, published in 1801

  Thomas Drummond was born in Edinburgh and attended the university, but his formative education took place at the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich. He was proficient at mathematics and engineering, and Thomas Colby, director of the Ordnance Survey, enlisted him as a lieutenant on the mapping of the English countryside, and a few years later as his deputy in Ireland. Drummond was a practical man, and from his base in Dublin he began improving the technology of mapping at a rate that brought him to the attention of the Royal Society, who asked him to demonstrate his inventions before Michael Faraday, an event that Drummond recalled as the proudest of his life.

  Much of the minutely detailed Irish survey was conducted with chains, but the goal of a ‘full face portrait of the land’ required a full arsenal of new sights. Drummond had made small improvements to the barometer, the photometer and an optical device known as the aethroscope, but it was his portable enhancement of the heliostat that garnered particular attention, a mirror that deflected the sun’s rays towards a particular distant target. But what could be done after sunset, or on those frequent days when there was sleet, haze, smog and murk? Drummond found that the solution to the pea-souper was the ‘pea-light’, a small pellet of lime (calcium oxide) that, when burned with an oxy-hydrogen flame, produced a light hugely more powerful than either a burning torch, the popular Argand oil lamp or nascent gaslight. The intensity greatly increased the distance possible between trig points; in bad light or snow a signal could now be seen up to a hundred miles away.

  And in this way did ‘limelight’ enter the vocabulary. It wasn’t Drummond’s invention (the first oxy-hydrogen blowtorch was developed by the Cornish scientist Goldsworthy Gurney a few years before), but he gave it its first great application and, in harnessing its use in lanterns, significantly refined its safety and glow-time. When the ‘Drummond Light’ was used with the ‘Drummond Baseline’ (a measuring technique involving metal bars), a highly accurate survey of the whole of Ireland was carried out in just twenty-one years. Many decades later, when they re-measured the baseline which had been set up in the 1820s, they found that it was accurate to within one inch in eight miles.

  And across the Irish Sea, London’s theatre goers also had cause to be grateful to Drummond. The first use of limelight onstage is believed to have been at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, in 1837, for the musical farce Peeping Tom of Coventry, when limelight complemented gaslight and was used primarily to focus on the star performer or a dramatic epiphany. Dan Leno, Marie Lloyd and Little Titch all flourished in the limelight, and the fading of the light at the turn of the century – when electricity took over – ran parallel with the slow demise of the music hall.

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  Great British colonial surveys extended far beyond Ireland. In fact, the greatest of them all extended to the highest point on earth. At the beginning of 1856, the tallest mountain in the world was known as many things, including Deodhunga, Bhairavathan, Chomolungma and Peak XV. At the end of 1856 it was known as Mount Everest.

  It was a strange choice of name. George Everest, by all accounts a domineering and ruthlessly exacting man, was the Surveyor General of India from 1830 to 1843. Yet he had almost certainly never seen the mountain, and he suggested that the locals would have trouble pronouncing it (as do we: he called himself Eev-rest rather than Ever-rest). But the imperial British were doing what they did rather well in the middle of the nineteenth century – putting their names on places on the map over which they had no dominion. Despite local objections, the name stuck, a small but telling by-product of the arrival in India of the new science of surveying from the mother country.

  The Great Trigonometrical Survey of India – conceived in 1799, commenced in 1802, but only officially titled in 1818 – was a close cousin of the Ordnance Survey, and was almost as transformative as its British counterpart. It marked the switch from broad Indian route mapping (the descriptive, landmark-based type useful for a traveller or trader) to the strict mathematical technique based on triangulation (the sort better suited to military planning, establishing a standard cartographical grid over which other maps could be matched or compared). It consolidated British dominance wherever a theodolite and trig point was placed, and the East India Company, the survey’s initial sponsor, took full advantage in claiming new territory under the guise of scientific progress. The survey relied on the importation of heavy British measuring equipment for its success, and on British-trained surveyors (William Lambton, the Great Survey’s first superintendent, was directly inspired by William Roy, while George Everest, who succeeded Lambton in the post, spent time with the Ordnance Survey in Ireland). The whole project, which lasted some sixty years, may also be considered particularly British in another sense, a ripping yarn worthy of a Pythonesque parody in which surveyors were ravaged by heatstroke, malaria and tigers as they struggled to cartographically tame the extremes of climate and jungle.

  Imperial ambition – the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India

  Beyond politically advantageous mapping, the Great Survey also achieved a genuinely scientific geographic breakthrough, establishing, at more than 1600 miles, the longest measurement of the earth’s surface. Before we could view it from space, this Great Meridional Arc, running south-to-north from the southernmost tip of Cape Comorin (now known as Kanyakumari) in Tamil Nadu province to the Himalayas and the edge of Nepal, provided the greatest glimpse of our planet’s curvature (an ambition first realised by Eratosthenes and his gnomon). The Arc produced the skeleton that followed – a great chain of maps stretching east and west from its central backbone.

  By contrast, the measurement of Everest was a moment of supreme cartographic hubris, as much to do with imperialist boasting as with mapping (for those concerned with triangulation it was the biggest triangle of all).* Its precise height was calculated by the brilliant Bengali mathematician Radhanath Sikdar as 29,000 feet, but it was announced at 29,002 feet lest it be considered a rough estimate (the height was the mean figure reached after computing the results of six separate survey stations, measured from between 108 and 118 miles from Everest’s summit). Its exact measurement was a matter of great pride for Colonel Andrew Waugh, the man who succeeded George Everest as Surveyor General (and named it after him). And its accuracy should now be regarded as a source of some pride for nineteenth-century mapping. Although the precise height of the mountain varies over time according to shifting tectonic plates and variations in snow covering (and debates over whether one should measure the snow cap at all), the widely accepted 21st century figure of 29,029 ft (8,848m) is an increase considered to be neither here nor there, even by those trying to reach its summit.

  Indian stamps commemorating two heroes of the Great Survey – Nain Singh and Radhanath Sikdar
. Singh explored the Himalayas and mapped much of Tibet, while Sikdar calculated the height of Peak XV (later renamed Mount Everest), and determined that it was the highest mountain in the world.

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  Back where it began, the Ordnance Survey was itself rapidly becoming a part of the British landscape. By the First World War its symbols were as recognisable as roadsigns, the maps sold in their millions, a new edition on a new scale was a significant event, and concertinas of sheets nestled close to gloves, scarves and flasks in every carriage, reading room and boot-room. A new written and visual language had evolved around them, alongside an almost universally accepted set of rules as to how we should map a rapidly changing territory. The maps were gently modifying the British sense of place, and defining a culture far beyond the space they miniaturised.

  And once you had the mapping itch, you had to keep scratching it. Maps didn’t sit still and stay happy – you had to amend, bend, excise and redraw according to such inconvenient things as population explosions and demolition. Oddly for a country whose national borders rarely underwent the mayhem of war that beset others in mainland Europe, Britain seemed to possess an innate need to map. Not merely for practical and professional purposes, but because it seemed like a birth-right.

  For the Ordnance Survey, this meant a continual stream of revisions and new maps on a variety of scales. The job was never done, and would never be done. No sooner had an OS surveyor put their feet up to toast the completion of a new series, than the work would already be out of date. It was a wonder how they kept their sanity, for surely mapping was a terrible job: each year the ‘silences’ on maps – those spaces where there was nothing to see or report – became rarer.

  Although our choice of OS map scales has now shrunk, there once was a series for every use, pocket and location. There was the 1:2376 scale in the West Riding of Yorkshire of 1842, the 1:1250 scale first seen in Shoeburyness, Essex, in 1859, the 1:126,720 that became popular in the early 1900s, and the 1:10,560 ‘regular edition’ town maps with the 1:100,000 county maps, both from the 1960s. But now things have largely settled down, so that we have the National Grid Series, (marketed as the Explorer or ‘Orange’ series at 1:25,000, or 2½ inches to a mile); and the Landranger or ‘Pink’ series at 1:50,000 or 1¼ inches to a mile.

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  You can work your way through a clump of OS maps today and be struck how they construct, map by map, a matchless social history of a vanishing country. They log not just industrial and technological progress, but domestic sanitation, trends in travel and architecture, leisure habits and linguistic quirks. And they do this without knowing, an imperceptible march of years, like the thinning of hair.

  OS maps – indeed, all serious maps – are governed by rules of inclusion and exclusion, and by a highly commendable British rulebook that raised the bar for crabby and incontestable officiousness. The rules are numerous, varied and rigid, the result of both field practice and endless minuted committees at its headquarters in Southampton. In the 1990s, the cartographic historian Richard Oliver began compiling a list of regulations gathered from two centuries of internal style manuals to its surveyors, most of them previously unpublished, as to how OS should record what it observed. They are necessary, joyless, mundane and utterly compelling. (These paraphrased examples are drawn from the so-called Red Book of 1963, but they have modern equivalents, not so very different.)

  Allotments: Permanent ones are shown, but minor detail such as sheds are not.

  Bracken: Should be mapped as distinct vegetation category.

  Playgrounds: Gymnastic apparatus in public grounds was authorised to be shown on 1:2500 mapping in 1894. But play apparatus, e.g. swings and roundabouts, is not shown.

  Outhouses (Lavatories): Are shown if permanent, and if large enough to show without exaggeration. (Instructions to Draughtsmen and Plan Examiners, 1906)

  Taps: Taps on public drinking fountains will be shown.

  Churches: Subject to the approval of the church authorities, it is customary to publish ‘St John’s Church’ when it means ‘St John the Evangelist’, but it is also customary to keep ‘St John the Baptist’s Church’ in full.

  Trees: Are quite important but not crucial. In avenues or rows trees will be shown except where the symbol would obscure more important detail.

  Heath: Is nowadays defined as when the vegetation is ‘heather or bilberry’.

  Letter Boxes: Are mapped, except when built into post offices.

  Public Houses: Are licensed to sell intoxicants; they do not have overnight accommodation for travellers. (If they do, they are inns.)

  Legal Value of OS Mapping: Indisputable. Two court judgements in 1939 and 1957 ruled that anything appearing on an OS map is prima facie evidence of its existence on the ground; if it’s on the map, it’s in the world.

  And then there were the space-saving, often perplexing abbreviations, used on OS maps and hardly anywhere else. San was Sanitorium, SM was Sloping Masonry, St was Stone, ST was Spring Tides, St was Stable and Sta was Station. W could mean Walk, Wall, Water, Watershed, Way, Weir, Well, West, Wharf or Wood. Best of luck with that.

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  But that’s all in the past. Aren’t paper maps finished for all but the incurably nostalgic? OS perceived the dawn of digital cartography in the early-1970s, when it began transferring its data to magnetic tape and looking forward to a time when a hiker could send a postal order for a map tailor-made to their next fortnight in the foggy Dales. Too bad they didn’t foresee the £50 GPS handheld, nor the map-less clowns who yomp up Ben Nevis at teatime with a fading single bar on their iPhones.

  But what if paper maps have a future? What if we’ve seen the small-screen limitations of GPS and are requiring the broader picture once again? Are we nostalgic for Britain on a scale of 1 to 25,000? What if young people were to put down their devices for a minute and feel the need to get muddy and soggy again with just a compass and a plastic map sheath around their necks? Is it possible, as OS would like to believe, that we may one day return to the fold? And if so, where would we go to learn about using these things?

  The Ordnance Survey, more than two centuries old, runs map-reading classes in indoor environments, predominantly in outdoor sports and camping shops. But in May 2011 one of these occurred at grid reference SP313271 – Jaffe & Neale’s Bookshop and Café in Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire.

  We were given plastic compasses tied to large boards with maps on them to place on our knees. OS staff Richard Ward and Simon Rose announced that usually the session consists of them doing all the talking, but they had just that week taken possession of a set of instructional videos featuring the television naturalist Simon King, and so we sat around watching those until it was time to find our way for ourselves. It was all propaganda, of course, but of the gentle sort, the sort that made you want to get out of the bookshop and start walking. King said that he enjoyed the way that his phone made things easier, ‘but nothing replaces a paper map. Only by spreading a sheet out and looking at how the different features on the ground relate to each other can you get a clear idea of the landscape … I just love them!’

  In 2007 a car insurance survey found fifteen million UK drivers couldn’t identify basic OS roadmap symbols. These were the test questions. The answers are: [1] mud, [2] motorway, [3] bus or coach station, [4] nature reserve, [5] toilets, [6] train station, [7] place of worship, [8] picnic site, [9] place of worship with spire, [10] campsite. Women scored slightly higher than men, but overall 55% couldn’t recognise a toilet, 83% a motorway, and an impressive 91% would be likely to get stuck in the mud.

  He introduced the two main series, the Explorer and the Landranger, and in the next film he talked about grid references, and the one after that it was contours (where the contour lines are close together the area will be steep, but further apart they’ll be more level). And then it was compass bearings and finding grid north as opposed to magnetic north (magnetic north is constantly shifting depending on where you are in the worl
d and the strength of magnetic force; we had to shift the compass housing a few degrees anti-clockwise to orientate the map correctly). After each clip we had exercises. We had to locate symbols on a map and say what they meant: a pub and (one of those OS words that hasn’t been used since 1791) a bunkhouse.

  Like all paper empires facing ruin by satellite, the Ordnance Survey is doing what it can to keep up with the digital present. Its first maps were produced digitally in 1972, and four years later its Director General, B. St G. Irwin, a man whose very name suggests OS symbols, told a meeting of the Royal Geographical Society that one in every six of its large-scale maps was produced with the aid of computer coding. Irwin estimated that it would be ‘towards the end of the twenty-first century’ before this progress resulted in the complete digitisation of the OS database.

  This has, of course, happened more quickly than planned. OS now offers a print-at-home subscription service, wherein users can select map coordinates of their choosing, plot a personal route for a nice day out, and then print it out or download it to their mobile phone. Its website offers an impressive range of handheld GPS devices and a guide to geocaching (a GPS-based treasure hunt), as well as socks, hydration packs, insect repellent and blister packs. There is also a range of free large-scale maps to download, largely as a result of pressure from OpenStreetMap, the organisation that has argued that UK taxpayers are otherwise effectively paying for the OS twice.