And perhaps there is another positive analogue reaction to the neatness and programmed ease of digital mapping. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the modern art world has embraced cartography as never before, a trend heralded by Alighiero Boetti, Jenny Holzer, Jeremy Deller, Stanley Donwood and Paula Scher, and most passionately by the London-based artist and potter, Grayson Perry.
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Grayson Perry’s 2011 show at the British Museum, The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman, contained pots, tapestries and drawings that suggested that we had entered a new golden age of hand-crafted wayfinding, albeit often of a mythical and highly autobiographical nature.
Perry had previously drawn a huge and complex modern-day Mappa Mundi called Map of Nowhere, complete with souls engaged on a Ruritanian pilgrimage to shrines labelled Microsoft and Starbucks, passing possible resting places marked ‘binge drinking’ and ‘having-it-all’. Always religiously suspicious, Perry’s map centres not on Jerusalem, but on ‘Doubt’. His British Museum show went further, emphasising his love of maps that display the emotional and irrational, and maps as empirical objects displaying the commonplace.
The centerpiece was a tapestry more than 20ft long and 9ft in length entitled Map of Truths and Beliefs. At its heart was a depiction of the museum itself, with the main rooms each named for the afterlife (Heaven, Nirvana, Hell, Valhalla, Astral Plane, Avalon and, returning to cartography for the first time in 500 years, Paradise). The embroidery covered a collection of landmarks seldom seen together on other maps from any period: Nashville, Hiroshima, Monaco, Silicon Valley, Oxford, Angkor Wat and Wembley. There were figures from the artist’s personal iconography, and symbols (walled cities, itinerant sailors, lonely citadels) that wouldn’t have looked out of place on inked medieval calfskin, if only they weren’t joined by helicopters, caravans and a nuclear power station. But they had as much mysterious right to be there as anything.
Objects you could manipulate and upset: Grayson Perry in front of a section of his Map of Truths and Beliefs.
After an evening talk at the museum I asked Perry about his devotion to maps. He said that he thought all children shared this obsession before they lost their sense of wonder. ‘I became aware of the possibility of maps as objects you could manipulate and upset,’ he said, ‘and the fact that they can tell personal stories rather than official ones.’
The gift shop offered a Grayson Perry map on a silk scarf, and it joined a growing list of map merchandise that has very little to do with getting around. A short walk from the British Museum will take you to Stanfords in Covent Garden, where the gift items suggest that cartography has reached unprecedented levels of hipness. Old-school paper maps appear as wrappers on ‘It’s A Small World’ chocolates, on a global warming world mug (the coastlines disappear when you add hot liquid) and a giant eight-sheet pack of world wallpaper. The World Map Shower Curtain proved so popular after appearances in Friends and Sex and the City that they brought out one showing the New York Subway map. And how to explain the distinct unusefulness of a map wrapped around a pencil, or the hip-flask with scraps of an old school atlas printed on it?
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We should end not with the past but with the future, and this takes us back online. The biggest open-source mash-up of all is OpenStreetMap, which with its ambitions to cover the entire world with local contributors might consider itself more of a Mapipedia (though not to be confused with WikiMapia – another collaborative mapping project).
OSM began in 2004 as an alternative to Tele Atlas and Navteq, happy to be free of its regimented appearance and fees. It is truly a map of the people for the people, with volunteers tracking their area with a GPS device and a determination to plot not only the roads and landmarks that appear on other maps but also things the major players may not consider, or might regard as superfluous – a cluster of benches in a park, a newly opened store, a clever cycle route. It is often the most up-to-date map available, and increasingly benefits not just from personal on-the-ground additions but also from large datasets of aerial photography and officially licensed surveys. It’s a goodwill map, and perhaps as close as we will get to a democratic map.
The same spirit, with greater urgency, invades the work of Ushahidi, a mapping platform that began as a method of monitoring violence in Kenya in 2008 and has since expanded to become the prime cartographic site for human rights work and emergency activism. Ushahidi’s catchphrase is corny but true – Changing the World One Map at a Time – and as a mark of its influence the UN has employed the immediacy of Ushahidi mapping in its crisis response to the killings in Syria and natural disasters in Japan and India.
Ushahidi’s strength lies not only in its mapping tools, but in the ability of local people to employ them. Universal ease of use has been one of the great developments of digital cartography, and nowhere has this been more evident than in Africa, where inhabitants of the Kenyan slum region Kibera and villagers in the Congo rainforests have increased their global visibility, and with it their rights and heritage, with the aid of simple GPS and an indestructible platform with which they may place themselves on the map.
And so we are back where we started, the place where maps began to make us human. But Africa is no longer dark, the poles are no longer white, and we are fairly sure we live on a planet with more than three continents. More people use more maps than at any other time in human history, but we have not lost sight of their beauty, romance or inherent usefulness. And nor have we mislaid their stories.
There is, of course, still quite a lot to be said for getting lost. This is a harder task these days, but it’s a downside we can tolerate. We may always turn off our phones, fairly safe in the knowledge that maps will still be there when we need them. We are searching souls, and the values we long ago entrusted in maps as guides and inspirations are still vibrant in the age of the Googleplex. For when we gaze at a map – any map, in any format, from any era – we still find nothing so much as history and ourselves.
Acknowledgements
I wish to express my great appreciation to everyone who has helped me with this book, and I am indebted in particular to those who gave up their time to be interviewed or answer what must have seemed very basic questions. Some appear in the text, but others do not, so thank you Bill Reese, the Very Reverend Peter Haynes, Dominic Harbour, Chris Clark, Graham Arader, Richard Green, Kate Berens, Peter Bellerby, Paul Lynam, Brian MacLendon, Thor Mitchell, Matt Galligan, Julia Grace, Norman Dennison, Tim Goodfellow, Harold Goddijn, Mark McConnell, Ian Griffin, Cressida Finch, Jonathan Potter, Alex Gross, Nicole Day, Francesca Thornberry, George Thierry Handja, Massimo De Martini.
I am also grateful to many people have provided additional advice and help: my agent Rosemary Scoular, Eleanor Farrell, Sara Wheeler, Bella Bathurst, Mark Ovenden, Max Roberts, Clare Morgan, Ralph and Patricia Kanter, Charlie Drew, Jack Drew, Tony Metzer, David Robson, Lucy Fleischmann, Suzanne Hodgart, Kristina Nilsson, Rosie Tickner, Deanna Yick, Nan Ross, Helen Francis, Carol Anderson, Diane Samuels and my children Ben and Jake Garfield.
A book such as this would be impossible without the patient attention and great knowledge of the librarians at The London Library, The British Library, the Royal Geographical Society Foyle Reading Room and the New York Public Library. Their resources – literature as well as maps – lie at the core of this work.
These days, any student of cartography benefits inestimably from the wealth of material online, and two sites have been particularly useful to me in my research. The first, the David Rumsey Map Collection (www.davidrumsey.com), is a zoomable feast of more than 30,000 maps, and will provide many hours of delight. The second, Tony Campbell’s www.maphistory.info, rightly bills itself as the gateway to cartography online, and you’ll find not only fascinating stories but also links to other knowledgeable sites, societies, journals and conferences.
Several people read and commented on the draft copy of the book, and I have mentioned all but one above. But I would like to single out
Andrew Bud, a great friend and faithful reader, for spotting some errors that would otherwise have caused sleepless nights, and for suggesting a couple of significant new directions.
I doubt whether any writer could wish for a more assured or painstaking editor than Mark Ellingham, and his work on the architecture of this book has been invaluable. The team at Profile have again been a pleasure to work with, and I would like to thank Andrew Franklin, Penny Daniel, Stephen Brough, Simon Shelmerdine, Peter Dyer, Niamh Murray, Claire Beaumont, Emily Orford, Anna-Marie Fitzgerald, Valentina Zanca, Ruth Killick and Rebecca Gray. Finally, I am hugely grateful for richly alluring jacket designed by Nathan Burton, and the endlessly imaginative design by James Alexander. The book would have been much the poorer without them.
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Picture credits
p16 Courtesy of Facebook; p28 Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum; p44 © The Times, November 20th 1988; p47 The Hereford Mappa Mundi reproduced by kind permission of the Dean and Chapter of Hereford and the Hereford Mappa Mundi Trust; p48 The Folio Society digital facsimile of the Hereford Mappa Mundi, reproduced by kind permission of the Dean and Chapter of Hereford, the Hereford Mappa Mundi Trust and the Folio Society; p53 The Folio Society digital facsimile of the Hereford Mappa Mundi, reproduced by kind permission of the Dean and Chapter of Hereford, the Hereford Mappa Mundi Trust and the Folio Society; p59 Courtesy of the British Library; p61 Courtesy of the British Library; p66 Courtesy of the British Library; p82 © Jim Siebold, Cartographic Images; p84 © Jim Siebold, Cartographic Images; p88 © Yale University Press; p93 © Yale University Press; p111 Courtesy of Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress; p136 Courtesy of Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Library of Congress; p145 ©Leen Helmink antique maps, www.helmink.com; p149 Courtesy of Arader Galleries; p150 ©Leen Helmink antique maps, www.helmink.com; p153 Courtesy of the David Rumsey Map Collection; p155 Courtesy of the David Rumsey Map Collection; p153 ©Janine Doyle; p162 © Barry Lawrence Ruderman Antique Maps Inc; p164 © Barry Lawrence Ruderman Antique Maps Inc; p173 Courtesy of the Museum of London; p206 Courtesy of the University of Texas Libraries, University of Texas at Austin; p208 Courtesy of the David Rumsey Map Collection; p212 Courtesy of the Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana; p215 Courtesy of the Rare Books Division, Princeton University Library; p281 ©Cassini Publishing Ltd; p284 © Cassini Publishing Ltd; p293 Courtesy of London Transport Museum; p295 Beck’s parody Courtesy of the London Transport Museum; p295 the Daily Mail Moral Underground courtesy of The Poke; p339 Courtesy of David Rumsey Map Collection; p349 Courtesy of the Imperial War Museum, London; p355 © Jessica Wager; p371 Nancy Chandler’s Map of Bangkok, reproduced courtesy of Nancy Chandler, www.nancychandler.net; p373 Courtesy of Shutterstock; p377 Courtesy of Europics; p386 Courtesy of Radio Times, Immediate Media; p388 © National Radio Astronomy Observatory; p401 Courtesy of the British Library; p426 ©Google Earth; p438 ©Saul Steinberg; p439 © Ellis Nadler; p441 ©Olivia Harris/Reuters
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