Map of a Nation: A Biography of the Ordnance Survey - Rachel Hewitt/Granta (2010)

When this book was published in 2010 it received a chorus of enthusiastic reviews. In the Sunday Times it was described as a ‘sparkling biography of the Ordnance Survey and the people who made Britain a cartographic leader.’ In The Times Jan Morris, the author of many travel and history books who died earlier this year, wrote, ‘Hewitt tackles the subject exuberantly …The sweep of its history …has true grandeur, and the incidentals of the tale are like desirables found in a cluttered antique shop.’

Anyone who walks in Britain benefits from the work of the Ordnance Survey either directly or indirectly. The creation in 1870 of the Ordnance Survey’s First Series, was a landmark as significant as ‘The Oxford English Dictionary’ in shaping how the country thought about itself …’

This paragraph describes its first appearance:

‘Finally, on 1st January 1801, the first Ordnance Survey map was released in the public. Constructed in four massive rectangular sheets, each one around thirty inches wide and twenty inches high, requiring four separate copper plates, the map advertised itself as the first offspring of the ‘General Survey of England and Wales.’ It proudly stated that it was ‘An Entirely New & Accurate Survey of the County of Kent, with Part of the County of Essex’ that had been made by ‘the Surveying Draftsmen of His Majesty’s Honourable Board of Ordnance,’ under the orders of Captn. W. Mudge of the Royal Artillery, Fellow of the Royal Society’. Faden was acknowledged as the map’s engraver and a smaller advertisement described how the Trigonometrical Survey’s measurements underpinned the whole. The map’s title resided underneath the Board of Ordnance’s coat of arms, which bore three cannon. In the bottom right hand corner the map displayed a dedication from ‘their most obedient and faithful servant W. Mudge’ to ‘Charles Marquis Cornwallis,’ Master -General of the Ordnance, and ‘the rest of the principal officers of His Majesty’s Ordnance.’ Around the borders , a scale resembling a piano keyboard described Kent’s precise situation in terms of latitude(measured from the zero degree line of the equator) and longitude(measured from the Greenwich meridian).

The Kent map presented an intricate black-and-white bird’s view of the most south-easterly corner of Britain. It stretched from the Straits of Dover in the south -east to Winchelsea in the south-west, up to London’s East End and over to the many tiny land masses, sandbanks , lighthouses and buoys that peppered the Thames Estuary in the map’s north-east corner. Kent and south Essex formed a remarkably varied nub of landscape, ranging from the wetlands of Romney Marsh to the precipitous white chalk cliffs of Dover and the Essex marshes were swaithed in mist ‘like a gaudy and radiant fabric.’