BOOKS & ARTS
ARTS SPECIAL
Contours of the mind
Maps reveal the psychology of their creators as much as they describe
topography, says Stephen BayleyI
n Australia, I have been told, the female
pubic area is sometimes known as a
‘mapatasi’ because its triangular shape
resembles a map of Tasmania. And since we
are discussing cartography and the nether
regions, it is wonderful to find in the British
Library’s new exhibition, Maps and the 20th
Century, that Countess Mountbatten wore
knickers made out of second world war air-
men’s silk escape maps.
Maps certainly colonise our imaginations
in many different ways. The allies in Iraq had
a ‘road map’ rather than a strategy. So much
of personal value can be lost in the creases
and folds of our own ‘mental maps’. And
couples who often travel in cars will know
the shrieking horrors of the map row, more
complicated nowadays since satnav offers a
third and often contrary route selection.
If you visit the British Library you might
use the Tube or go by road. So you will prob-
ably consult the Underground map or an
A-Z. Here are two examples of maps as illu-
sions, or, at least, persuasive abstractions.
Harry Beck was the London Transport
engineering draftsman who created the
modern Tube map. With great art he decided
to use only verticals, horizontals and diag-
onals while, for clarity, he greatly enlarged
the city’s central area. The result is an all-
time, trumpets-of-Jericho classic of graphic
design, admired and copied everywhere.
But if you see a technical plan of the
Tube lines as they actually are, it resembles a
bowl of spaghetti spilt on the floor. The dis-
parity between tangled ‘reality’ and Beck’s
superlative, reductive modernist capriccio is
shocking. It is not a faithful reproduction of
underlying facts, but a lie that works. There-
in is a central truth: the human mapping
instinct is as much art as it is science.
Then there is Phyllis Pearsall’s A-Z, whose
mapping protocols prioritise streets and
diminish everything else. These popular maps
are so familiar that we do not easily see how
very odd it is to have, say, Fentiman Road
given more pictorial status than Buckingham
Palace. The A-Z is a map that assumes sur-
face movement on roads between places ismore important than the places themselves. If
you were looking for a metaphor of the 20th
century, it’s in there somewhere.
Although maps were still a novelty circa
1900, the 20th century became their great
age: of the four million maps held by the
British Library, two thirds were produced
in this period. War was a stimulus: in 1914
the British Expeditionary Force map-
ping department had a staff of one offic-
er with an assistant. By the end of the first
world war 5,035 million map sheets had
been printed. Reporting on the military
campaigns, newspapers began to repro-
duce maps. At about this time, geography
became a university subject.
There is a weird beauty, a vicarious fas-
cination, in a relief map of Ypres in 1916,
produced by the Ordnance Survey in
Southampton. It is a technically correct and
amoral description of a theatre of atrocious
carnage, but it is good to know that scar-let majors at the base had excellent intel-
ligence about contour lines while speeding
glum heroes up the line to death.
Or what about Luftwaffe aerial photo-
graphs of the Liverpool–Birkenhead region
in 1940 with potential targets outlined in
red? Haunting to see great buildings marked
for demolition just hours before the bombs
fell. Here was a map that told the future... of slums. In 2012 the National Archives
launched an interactive Blitz map and an
app that allowed you to point your phone at
a building to see — a nice surreal touch, this
— if it had been bombed in 1940.
Maps, of course, reveal the psychologi-
cal states of their creators as much as they
describe topography. Cartographers create
maps and maps create our mindset. Thus
there have been radical attempts to change
perceptions. Was a third of the planet real-
ly once Imperial pink? During the second
world war, the bizarre azimuthal equidistant
projection showed the North Polar Sea at
the centre of the world, with the continents
all of a piece and trade routes and battlelines
clearly drawn.
In the Fifties the Peters projection, dis-
missed by many academic cartographers as
a prank, attempted to realign the world so
as to give more consideration to territories
neglected by convention. In the same dec-
ade, Guy Debord created psychogeography.
Popular travel has been as big a stimu-
lus to map design and production as war.
New generations of cyclists and motorists
required data. Michelin encouraged peo-
ple to burn more rubber by luring them to
gastronomic destinations, providing fine
If you were looking for a metaphor
of the 20th century, it’s in the A–Z
somewhere