The Spectator - October 29, 2016

He had brought a large map

representing the sea,

Without the least vestige of land:

And the crew were much pleased

when they found it to be

A map they could all understand.

It was, of course, a map that was completely

blank.

Now new technologies are changing the

parameters of what a map is. The first thing

you see in the British Library is a popula-

tion cartogram: a map that measures peo-

ple, not the earth’s surface. Charles Booth’s

Poverty Maps of London (1886–1903) were

maps to navigate their ‘voyage’ or ‘detour’
towards lunch or dinner.
Personally, I find Michelin maps com-
pletely engrossing and when occasionally
bored I will flip open an Atlas routier at,
say, page 173 square G2 and begin a reverie
about what it would be like to travel the D15
between Crosses and Jussy-Champagne. In
Germany, they used to have charming pub-
lications called Ihr Zugbegleiter, a little map
that showed what was rushing past the train
window. Perhaps high-speed rail made it an
impractical blur.
And then there is the poetry. In ‘The
Hunting of the Snark’, Lewis Carroll writes:

a prediction of new charts by the Italian

architect Carlo Ratti, who quantifies inter-

net traffic and redraws, say, Manhattan

using bandwidth rather than street width as

his measure. Ratti has also fitted air-quality

sensors on bikes to produce pollution maps.

A.A. Milne’s Hundred Acre Wood suddenly

seems very distant.

These same new digital technologies

mean that the 20th century’s output of paper

maps is not likely ever to be exceeded, but

German propaganda poster: a spider with the face of John Bull devours a French soldier at Calais

BRITISH LIBRARY

Cartographers create maps and

maps create our mindset