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

by Garfield, Simon

  There are many examples. In 1931, Fritz Lang’s M introduced a map that combined several features we would regard as digital and modern. A girl has been murdered by a serial killer in early 1930s Berlin, and an empty sweet bag is found at the crime scene. The police decide to investigate nearby confectionery shops, and their widening search is shown in a map sequence that changes in perspective from an oblique angle to an overhead ‘God-shot’, much as we may tilt the angle on a computer map or virtual globe. It may also be that M contains the first example anywhere of a map overlaid with sound – the talkies meeting cartography for the first time, another digital precursor, this time to the guidance/sound effects we have when we view maps on sat nav.

  ‘You can’t fight in here, this is the war room!’ The cartographic control centre in Dr Strangelove.

  And for the first appearance of sat nav itself we may look – where else? – to James Bond. In 1964’s Goldfinger Bond has placed a transmitter in Goldfinger’s car and tracks him from a round green screen in his Aston Martin. The image and sound are as much submarine sonar as TomTom or Garmin, but the idea is an enduring one almost fifty years on: you get in your car and you’re guided where to go. Another Cold War classic appeared in the same year. The operations room in Dr Strangelove has a backdrop of menacing moving dots showing the path of American B52s towards their Russian targets. The dots stop just in time, a darkly comic indicator of real-time remote military mapping we would later see in genuine conflicts.

  q q q

  Sébastien Caquard’s theory makes good sense, and why wouldn’t it? Why wouldn’t the world of modern cartography be influenced by movies the way the rest of us are? But how does the theory stack up against Harry Potter and The Prisoner of Azkaban?

  In 2004, Hogwarts welcomed a magical new plaything, The Marauder’s Map. Presented to Harry by the Weasley twins, the map is not initially impressive. ‘What’s this rubbish?’ Harry asks as he unfolds a large piece of rectangular parchment. It is completely blank. ‘That there’s the secret to our success,’ the twins explain. George Weasley taps the map with a wand as he proclaims, ‘I solemnly swear that I am up to no good.’ And with that, the blank parchment is gradually overwhelmed with writing and illustrations.

  An authentic replica Marauder’s Map – good on the folds, even if it lacks the magical insults.

  Why is the map – filmed fairly faithfully from the book – so useful? Harry takes a moment to realise. It is a real-time map of Hogwarts, and those are Dumbledore’s footprints pacing in his study. Harry is still astonished. ‘So you mean this map shows …’ The twins interject: ‘Everyone, where they are, what they’re doing, every minute of every day.’

  In its own way, we are looking at another Mappa Mundi, a mischievous world on calfskin. The map is expansive, and folds many times, coming to rest at approximately 2ft by 7ft. It shows practically the whole of Hogwarts, the classrooms, the ramparts, the corridors, the staircases, the cupboards. Harry will use it to locate the entrance to One-Eyed Witch Passage in Honeydukes sweetshop in Hogsmeade, and to find that Peter Pettigrew, widely considered dead, may not be. At the end of each session the phrase ‘mischief managed’ returns the map to blank parchment; if it falls into the hands of strangers, it reveals only insults in brown ink.

  Reassuringly, this too has a modern real-life equivalent. ‘The Marauder’s Map clearly embodies the surveillance potential of digital cartography,’ Sébastien Caquard posits. The ability to know where everyone is at any moment ‘resonates strongly with the military concept of dominant battlespace awareness (DBA).’ The question of whether J.K. Rowling infected the world’s military, or whether it was the other way around, is still open to discussion.

  q q q

  Not long after Humphrey Bogart and Harrison Ford saw off the Nazis, two new popular tourist trails sprung up that show no sign of waning. The first was set-jetting: a trip to a film’s location. Madison County to see the bridges perhaps, or to Paris for the Templar-Masonic locales of The Da Vinci Code. This can be fun – and many of us received our first mental maps of London, Paris and New York from the cinema – though we are wise enough to know that these cities only rarely look the way they do to Richard Curtis, Claude Chabrol or Woody Allen. And we are also aware that most Hollywood movies are not actually made in the places they purport. Better to travel the world the simple way, with a studio tour of the Universal or Warner Brothers lot.

  Or of course we can cut out the movies altogether and go stalking. The second post-war post-movie crush has been our desire to see filmstars’ homes – and maps have helped us on this quest since Johnny Weismuller lived at 423 N Rockingham, Brentwood and Gregory Peck put out his trash at 1700 San Remo, Santa Monica.

  In the 1960s Mitock & Sons of 13561½ Ventura Blvd, Sherman Oaks, California, sold The Movieland Guide to the Fabulous Homes of Movie, Television and Radio Stars, a map which featured pictures on its cover of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, Liberace, Bob Hope and Marilyn Monroe. And the map delivered. Not only could you find out where these stars lived, but you could drive to their houses, park by their gates, and presumably, in those innocent days, not be escorted away if you hung around. There were locations for Clark Gable (4545 N Pettit, Encino), Henry Fonda (600 Tigertail, Brentwood), Errol Flynn (7740 Mulholland Drive), Rudolf Valentino (2, Bella Drive) and the last home of W.C. Fields (2015 De Mille Drive, Hollywood).

  This was clearly a time when the stars were stars, and most of the maps (for San Fernando Valley, Santa Monica, Brentwood, Bel Air and Hollywood) are hand-drawn and authentically primitive, the sort of lines one might make to direct someone to a petrol station. But they are also clear and precise, the street names in black capitals, the houses of the famous marked in red, and the thick red stream of Sunset Boulevard running through the centre of most of them. The maps work well not just as location devices, but equally as social documents. Hollywood never seemed so inviting or self-contained, nor so stellar. Hardly a street seems to be without its share of glamour, and a diligent postman delivering scripts could cast a double feature on his morning round.

  Movie stars’ homes – a stalker’s map from more innocent times. James Stewart is at no 31 opposite Claude Raines at no 30.

  That was the sixties. In 2012, a hut on Santa Monica pier sells another map, Movie Star Homes and Notorious Crime Scenes, and the only thing it shares with the older map is a fascination with Marilyn Monroe. On the sixties map she was alive, and now she is dead, and the locations are increasingly prurient – her orphanage (815 North El Centro), the place she stayed after her bust-up with Joe DiMaggio (8336 De Longpre), and where, at the Mauretania hotel on North Rossmore, she had a thing with JFK. Can two maps, some fifty years apart, better sum up a downward society?

  ‘Visit shocking crime scenes straight from the headlines,’ the cover implores. ‘You get details and prices of these incredible homes!! This is the map the Stars don’t want you to have!!!’ If there were any more exclamation marks there wouldn’t be room for anything else!!!! But the map, which folds out to cover a small dining room table, is an extraordinarily efficient and compelling work. We learn, for example, where Hugh Grant got caught with a prostitute, and where Phil Hartman, the voice of Clinton on Saturday Night Live and Troy McClure on The Simpsons, was shot dead by his wife in 1998 before she turned the gun on herself. The map is a nightmare of electric colours, but it has very clear signage and markings, and an enviably simple legend: a red star signifies a crime scene, a pink one shows an actor’s home, and a bullseye with flames around it marks a celebrity nightclub, boutique or deli.

  The biggest change from the 1960s is Malibu. Once home to the relatively obscure (Dennis O’Keefe, Turhan ‘Turkish Delight’ Bey, Gregory Ratoff), it is now a living version of People magazine, and an attempt at traditional mapping would be out of date as soon as it was printed. So a new star map has presented itself, the gossip-bursting ninety-minute StarLine tour along Pacific Coast Highway conducted in a small open-top bus by a middle-aged wom
an named Renee.

  There are twelve of us in the car park by Santa Monica pier, including a family of four from Dortmund, and we have each paid $39 for access to the map in Renee’s head. We start at the Casa Del Mar hotel, where she says Al Pacino used to stay. Renee once saw Al Pacino in real life, and he was driving a convertible red Ferrari. We roll down towards the coast. ‘This is where Will Rodgers lived, the actor and cowboy, he was killed in an aircrash in 1935. You know who was in court today? Lindsay Lohan, about that bracelet. On the left is Moonshadows, where Mel Gibson had a few drinks with the ladies. An hour later he got pulled over for drink driving.’

  After fifteen minutes there is a photo opportunity at Jeff and Beau Bridges’ house, and it is apparent that we are not seeing the beautiful beach-front homes in their best light. The most attractive vista is from the beach, from where you can see the decks, and maybe the superstars prone and oiled upon them. Unfortunately what we see is predominantly garbage bins and garages, and the occasional jogger carrying Evian.

  ‘And the brown garage is Ryan O’Neal’s house,’ Renee says, ‘and Ryan lived there with Farrah Fawcett Majors before she died. I saw their child last week. And there is the Osbournes’ House – that was put up for sale this week, you’ll see the Sotheby’s sign … That’s Leonardo DiCaprio’s house – the blue and white modern one. This is David Geffen’s, with three garages. Number 22148, that’s Jennifer Aniston’s house, beautiful, both the house and the actress.’

  The bus rolled on: it was still cartography of sorts.

  Pocket Map

  A Hareraising Masquerade

  In 1979, a book appeared featuring fifteen colour paintings whose hidden clues led to a location in Britain where you could dig for treasure. The book itself was a mental map, but its novelty was that it demanded the construction of a real, practical treasure map from its readers.

  The book was called Masquerade, a title which belied the anguish created for its devotional followers. If your map was accurate you’d uncover a ceramic box, within which you’d find an intricately turned golden hare with bells and jewels attached to its feet, and the sun and the moon dangling from its body. That was the prize, but it wasn’t the fun. The fun was the quest – a race against others, a hunt for treasure that would make you feel like a child again. The back cover of the book stated that ‘the treasure is as likely to be found by a bright child of ten with an understanding of language, simple mathematics and astronomy as it is to be found by an Oxford don.’ It became an international sensation, with hopeful groups setting off from all points of the compass.

  The concept, paintings and bejewelled hare were all created by Kit Williams, a folk artist with a proper beard and a vaguely Luddite mistrust of the modern world (the hare was in a brown clay pouch topped up with wax to thwart metal detectors). The book, a marketing department’s dream, jumped effortlessly from the children’s book pages to national news bulletins, and sold some 1.5 million copies worldwide.

  The story wasn’t really the thing – a tale about the moon falling in love with the sun and giving the messenger hare a love-token which somehow got lost in the stars. However, very slowly, if you were the sort of person who liked cryptic crosswords, you’d look long enough at the pictures and a location would reveal itself. Then you’d reach for your Ordnance Survey stash to start narrowing things down, and after that you’d write to Kit Williams, hopeful for affirmation.

  But for a long time, nobody found the treasure. Instead, for almost three years, Kit Williams received more maps in the post than anyone had ever received before – hundreds every week. Everyone was an amateur detective, and although some readers would start digging before corresponding, most would await the nod from Williams to tell them they were somewhere close. The maps and diagrams were hand-drawn with various degrees of dexterity. Many would show a patch of the English countryside with fields, trees, nearby roads and other landmarks, although deciphering them was an arduous task.

  Then one day in August 1982, Williams received a letter, inside which was the map he had been awaiting. ‘It was almost a childlike map,’ he recalled, ‘but it was describing exactly where the jewel was.’ The sender was a man named Ken Thomas, who duly set off to dig up the hare – which was buried in a park in Ampthill, Bedfordshire, off Junction 13 on the M1.

  Ken Thomas’s map, ‘solving’ Kit Williams’s Masquerade.

  Ken Thomas told Williams that he had been searching for the hare for a little over a year but had uncovered the true location largely by accident. He had solved only a few of the clues, which led him to the region, but by chance his dog peed on the base of one of the two white stone crosses in Ampthill Park and he noticed its inscription – which turned out to be the key to everything. It was a disappointing conclusion, and an odd one. Solving Masquerade was huge news, yet Thomas was publicity shy.

  The solution was then revealed in the paperback, and it was simpler than anyone had imagined. You followed the eye-line of every creature in every picture through their longest finger or biggest toe, picked out the letters they pointed to on every border, and eventually you’d get the words ‘Catherine’s longfinger over shadows earth buried yellow amulet midday points the hour in light of equinox look you.’ It was a vertical acrostic, the first letter from each word or phrase arranged in a list producing ‘Close by Ampthill’. You went to Ampthill Park on midsummer solstice, past a clock in the town that looked very like one in the book, waited for the sun to hit the top of a tall memorial cross erected for Catherine of Aragon (who is referenced more than once in the book), and then started digging where the tip of the shadow hit the grass. Williams had intended it to be ‘like a cross on a pirate’s map.’

  How wonderful. Unfortunately, the charm of the story was subsequently tarnished by the revelation that Ken Thomas was really called Dugald Thompson and – unknown to Kit Williams – was the business partner of a man who lived with his ex-girlfriend. He had uncovered the hare not by a process of riddle-solving and map-making, but through her recollection of a picnic in the park. A rather modern spot of piracy.

  Chapter 18

  How to Make a Very Big Globe

  About five miles into the journey, Peter Bellerby fixed the sat nav to his windscreen and tapped in the postcode. It was the usual procedure: you set off in the car from a familiar place, and only when you get a little nervous do the satellites take your hand. Bellerby, a forty-five-year-old maker of globes, was on his way to Chartwell in Kent, once the country home of Winston Churchill. The journey would take a little over an hour from his house in Stoke Newington, out of London on the M11 and then the M25, completing the journey on the A21 – not that one really had to know any of this anymore.

  It was a clear, cold November day. Because he no longer had to concentrate on his route, Bellerby could concentrate on his story. He was going to Chartwell to see an exceptionally large globe. He had seen it for the first time a few weeks earlier, but on that occasion his trip had been cloaked in mystery. ‘I had read about the globe,’ he explained. ‘And so I called Chartwell, and asked, “do you have the globe there?” And they said, “No, there’s no globe here.”’

  Bellerby explained that the globe was given to both Churchill and Roosevelt during the war, and he understood that although it had been delivered to Downing Street, Churchill had taken it to Chartwell. ‘No, there’s no globe here whatsoever.’ Bellerby described the dimensions: fifty inches in diameter. ‘No, it wouldn’t fit. We couldn’t get anything like that in Chartwell.’

  Bellerby then spoke to a woman at the Cabinet War Rooms who also denied having the globe. Then he tried the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich and drew a blank there too. He wrote to Downing Street just after David Cameron’s election. ‘Two days later I got a letter back. A man in the Prime Minister’s office said he had also spoken to Chartwell, and they told him “absolutely not”.’ He also made enquiries at Chequers and other places, but nothing came of it. He then wrote to the Royal Collection and they also repl
ied with a shrug.

  ‘I was thinking of going to Washington to see Roosevelt’s copy of the globe. Then I spoke to a woman from IMCoS, [the International Map Collectors’ Society] and she said “It’s definitely at Chartwell. I know it’s there, because I saw it last month. So unless they’ve moved it …” But it’s not the sort of thing you’d move, it would just fall apart.’

  Roosevelt contemplates his globe – identical to Churchill’s.

  So Bellerby went down to Chartwell during normal tourist opening hours, and there it was. ‘I spoke to a man at the grand entrance who said, “Oh, the Churchill globe…”. He went on about it for ten minutes, and when I introduced myself he got a little bit sheepish. But he did give me free entry, and then said, “I think we’re a bit coy about it because we’re worried someone else might claim it. We certainly don’t want any of the other museums to pinch it off us.” But then on my way out he said, “Oh, we’ve established we own it so it’s not a problem.”’

  Bellerby was keen to see the globe again because he wanted to copy it. Or at least he wanted to copy the idea of it – its size and impact, its in-your-face geometry – while updating its surface with a more modern map, rather than the one made in the 1930s, before Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin and Hitler turned the globe on its axis.

  r

  Bellerby has the air of a down-at-heel toff. He looks very like the actor Steven Mackintosh. Before he turned to globemaking, he worked in globe rolling, running a London bowling alley called Bloomsbury Bowl. Bellerby arrived initially only to install the wooden lanes, but he then agreed to manage the place. It was full every night, a big party hit, but after three years the novelty had long worn off.