This article is taken from the November 2022 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

Maps are at once aids and images, means and messages. They are also part of the fascination of the past and of its ability to help in the shaping of subliminal lessons about the character and extent of national identity.

Britain’s cartographic imprint might seem clear. An island realm miniaturised from Christopher Saxton’s county maps of Elizabethan England and Wales to the Ordnance Survey of the present, and clarified by the GPS systems that have replaced the A to Z.

Yet, alongside these familiar surveys are those offering differing priorities and suggestions, whether accounts of politics or of poverty, the country as a target to others or as the base for international power. Everything and anything can be and has been “mapped”, from religious sentiment to the distribution of genius, or golf courses. 

That is part of the history, for there has been state mapping but also the reach of entrepreneurialism and the impact of individualism, the two key elements in national culture. Map publishers, for example, rapidly rose to such challenges as the need to provide guides for cyclists and motorists, hikers and film location buffs as well, and to annotate the fictional landscapes of Winnie-the- Pooh, Thomas the Tank Engine, Toad of Toad Hall, and even Agatha Christie’s Murder in the Vicarage.

We tend to think of antiquarian maps as those of greatest interest and importance, as they often are. Thus, Matthew Paris’s Map of Britain of about 1255 and “The Gough Map” of just over a century later, show the attempt to provide a sense of place and position, as well as developments in mapmaking.

At 45 inches by 22 inches, “The Gough Map” was eight times larger than that of Matthew Paris, and also provided great detail, notably on routes and the resulting national networks. England was a remarkably homogeneous state by European standards, with an emphasis on the Common Law serving as a way to enhance national governance.

Maps produced over the last two centuries are also of significance and appeal. However, the zeal with which the more recent maps can be discarded to make way for new editions or, even more, technologies of presentation, may well mean that maps and images with which we were familiar rapidly become rare and collectable.

Any book of maps inevitably leads to contemplation not only of what could have been offered instead, but also of where we are going. Consider the inclusion or not of England or Scotland in a map, and the impact is readily clear. This is the case not only for the images of nation but also for the topics covered. 

This can, for instance, be seen in control over land. Thus, the map of Ulster found in the papers of Robert, Earl of Salisbury, chief minister of James I (VI of Scotland) reflects the possibilities for English and Scottish “planters” (settlers) created by English victory in the Nine Years’ War of 1594 to 1603. Much of Ulster was seized from 1607. 

Somewhat differently, the map of Scottish land ownership in 2013 was intended to demonstrate the inequitable nature of Scottish land ownership. The map very much conveys that impression, not least by using the boldest colour for the largest privately-owned estates, and a muted colour, white, for its counter, publicly-owned land. The arresting map is instructive for what it does not contain, notably material on land value or terrain. 

Many of the large estates are of limited value per acre. Moreover, the map does not capture the transition from traditional large individual estates, notably that of the Duke of Buccleuch, to new, international owners, particularly Anders Holch Povlsen, the Rausing sisters, and the ruler of Dubai.

Printing was the most important development in cartographical techniques as it permitted the production of multiple copies in a manner that was very different to that of monastic scriptoria. Although there was no automatic consequence, this method also encouraged a standardisation in such issues as projection, perspective and scale. 

Printing also provided the opportunities for entrepreneurial profit, and this was abundantly clear in publication projects, such as the road maps produced from the late seventeenth century, and the large number of county and town maps in the eighteenth. 

An understanding of geography became a norm of education, and its absence a matter of humour. In Jane Austen’s Emma, Harriet Smith does not realise that Frank Churchill would not pass through Bath en route from Yorkshire to Surrey, while in Mansfield Park, Fanny Price fails to understand that the Isle of Wight is not on the best route to take for Ireland.

In practice, alongside books and maps for real and armchair travellers, there were board games, such as John Wallis’s   Tour Through England and Wales (1794). Maps were part of   the understanding of the nation. Moreover, they show how   this understanding could change. Thus, the maps of Kent that are included, that from Philip Symonson’s New Description of Kent (1596) and the 1801 map drawing on the work by the Board of Ordnance, show the increased detail that could be available. 

There was also the relevance of fitness for purpose, always a key element in mapmaking. Britain was at war with France and fearing invasion when the 1801 map was printed. There was considerable emphasis on depicting “strong ground,” terrain that could play a role in operations; relief and slopes were important, not only to help or impede advances but also for determining the sightline of cannon. War, as much as commerce, ownership and travel, has frequently been vital not just to the production but the development and uses to which maps have been put.

It is not acceptable, as it was in earlier cartographic days, to leave sections of the map blank. Instead, information is supposed to be comprehensive and uniform. That situation makes the rise in thematic mapping from the late eighteenth century of particular interest, and notably so with enclosure, canal, geological, railway and tithe maps, whether singly or in combination. 

The breadth of these topics widened considerably during the nineteenth century, with the spatial indicators of data mappable and of interest. Governmental purposes, such as the territorialisation of Poor Law Unions were matched by those of committed individuals and groups, as in the depictions of poverty most classically seen in London and York.