Map Addict

A TALE OF OBSESSION, FUDGE & THE ORDNANCE SURVEY

To Rachel.

At last.

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Dedication

INTRODUCTION

1. TREASURE ISLAND

2. L’ENTENTE CARTIALE

3. EVERY NODULE AND BOBBLE

4. BORDERLINE OBSESSION

5. THE POWER MAP

6. GOD IS IN THE DETAIL

7. CARTO EROTICA

8. BOYS’ TOYS?

9. PRATNAV

10. GOING OFF-MAP

BIBLIOGRAPHY

WEBSITES

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Copyright

About the Publisher

INTRODUCTION

Recently, some new neighbours moved in. They’d trekked halfway across the country, from the fringes of Manchester to their new life in our small village in the mountains of mid Wales. One night, I was showing them a good local walk, using my well-worn Ordnance Survey Explorer Map (OL23 Cadair Idris & Llyn Tegid, for aficionados). ‘Oh, yes,’ one of them mused. ‘That reminds me, I must get a map of the area.’

I swear the world stood still. What I wanted to say was, ‘You mean, you moved here from over a hundred miles away without buying a map first? Without taking it out on a nightly basis, stroking its contours, gently murmuring the unfamiliar names, idly following with your finger footpaths and streams, back lanes and bridleways, feeling faintly, randomly intimidated by the angular blocks of plantation forestry and sumps of squelchy moorland, excited by the wide beaches, towering peaks, limpid lakes and nestled market towns, all spread beguilingly across the paper? Without enjoying the thrill of anticipation of your impending move to a whole new world? Without checking out that whole new world, as captured by the gods of the Ordnance Survey? Are you mad? What in bejesus’ name is the matter with you?’

What I actually said was, ‘Oh, right. They sell them in the bookshop in town.’

If my cowardly internalised rant had you mentally nodding in agreement; if you like to check the map before a trip to B&Q; if you can sit and read a good map like others read Hello! or Heat, then this book is for you. You are a fellow-mappie, we are of one flesh. If, on the other hand, it’s got you thinking, ‘What a ridiculous over-reaction: what’s his problem, then?’ I’d advise you to put the book down now and walk away from it before it begins seriously to annoy you.

Many children have imaginary friends to help offset a lonely world. I had imaginary towns instead, and they were all intricately mapped. Hours would dribble by as I sat, tongue slightly protruding, drawing detailed plans of these fictional fiefdoms, giggling quietly to myself as I named the streets, threw in a ring road or bypass—this was the 1970s, after all—and methodically placing schools, stations and hospitals into the growing grid.

Any careers psychologist, observing this habit (especially the relish with which I’d drive a new dual carriageway through anything), would have predicted with utmost confidence that I was destined to become a town planner. But it wasn’t the towns or the buildings or the streets themselves that interested me—just the maps. It didn’t matter that they were imaginary; any map, any reduction of a complex landscape into two clean, clear dimensions, somehow thrilled and comforted me. More than thirty years on, it still does.

While some people, to shut out the insistent thrum of life, slide into the well-worn addictions of drink, drugs, sex, shopping, tattoos, piercings, plastic surgery, food or slicing themselves, my route of escape has long been thrusting my head into a map and staying there until the deafening buzz recedes. When all else around you is going psychotic, you can still depend on a map, and some of us can waste happy hours lost in its calm infallibility. Even the crisp smell of an Ordnance Survey provides its own instant Rescue Remedy.

My name is Mike and I am a map addict. There, it’s said. I’m the one in the car with the map in his lap, following its route with rapt concentration and a slowly moving index finger—often at the expense of seeing the actual landscape it depicts rolling past on the other side of the window. I’m the one who, on buying my first house, moved my entire map collection into it and ensured that it was perfectly shelved in its new home before bringing in anything useful, such as a kettle, toaster or teabag. I’m the one who will annoy anyone I’m sharing a flight with by repeatedly jabbing at the window and telling them which town we’re flying over, just because I recognised its shape and road pattern from decades of idle map scrutiny (and by the same token, I’m now the one losing whole days on Google Earth). It’s me who’ll spend longer planning a walk than actually doing it, who has to get the map out to go to the shops, who actually enjoys those interminable conversations about which route we all took to reach wherever we are, who can recognise the symbol for a bridle track or lighthouse (disused) at forty paces, whose favourite childhood show was The Wombles, simply because the little recycling furballs took their names from Great Uncle Bulgaria’s atlas. Actually, that’s not quite true. My favourite childhood show was Ivor the Engine, which combined maps with its exotic setting ‘in the top left-hand corner of Wales’: two of my passions deliciously stirred by one antique animation.

At the age of six, I began my own map collection, kick-started by a joyous discovery. My first true love was found lurking in the cellar when we moved into a new house. Not only was it my first love, it was my first cellar, full of spiders and dusty promise. The previous owners had left various bits of tat below stairs which were a pure treasure trove to me. A peeling mural of the Sergeant Pepper album title, painted by their adolescent son, filled one wall. I had no idea what it was or what it meant, but it oozed cool and teenage pheromones. But the true object of my affections lay hidden, covered in cobwebs, in the back of a dusty alcove. A relief map of the West Midlands and Wales, a good three foot by two, carved out in brittle plastic, its moulded hills soaring. It was love at first sneeze.

There was the sinuous line of the River Severn winding its way up through the Worcestershire towns I knew so well. The Malvern Hills, punting proudly out of the flat plains, looked like the brassiere of some ’50s Hollywood starlet, all swaggering panache and perky promise. Like a spreading ink stain, the big pink blotch of Birmingham and the Black Country seemed in danger of engulfing the little flecks of urban outposts surrounding it, my own home town included. And Wales looked so different, and so very foreign. Where the English side of the map was a mass of pink splotches and a tangle of roads ancient and modern on a landscape that barely rose to any noticeable toy height, Wales was dark, brooding and rippled with mountains that soared and plunged in mysterious plasticity. Tiny settlements, hardly any of which warranted any pink stippling, peeked out from valley floors and river confluences. The crags of Snowdonia, by far the largest and lairiest on the map, shot skywards and soon began to lose their markings, so often did I stroke their peaks in eager anticipation of the day when these little plastic bumps would become real to me.

Hours I spent in rapt contemplation of that map. I memorised the look and shape of the conurbations, of Bristol, Stoke, Chester, Coventry, Cardiff, Brum, Manchester and Liverpool, so that I could recognise them, like a psychiatrist’s inkblot test, in an instant. I ran my finger appreciatively along river courses, feeling the way the Mersey, Wye or Dee bubbled down from the hills, along ever-widening valleys before disgorging into the smooth blue expanses of estuary and sea. But nothing approached the tactility of the Welsh hills, whose come-hither bumps and lumps kept inviting me back for more.

Before long, I’d started to save my pocket money in order to buy maps, the fuchsia pink Ordnance Survey 1:50 000 series in particular. My step-mum donated an old sewing box with a padded hinged lid for my burgeoning collection, and it followed me everywhere, even on daytrips to bemused relatives. But there were 204 of the bloody things to collect, and on a fairly meagre allowance, it was painfully obvious to me that it would take decades to finish the job, an unimaginable yawn of time to a youngster. As a result, maps even accounted for the modest zenith in my teenage shoplifting career. While my mates were nicking records, sweets or fags, I was making regular forays into the Midland Educational Bookshop in Worcester to fill my school bag with bright, gleaming Ordnance Survey maps.

It was way too easy. While eagle-eyed shop assistants kept close watch on the pens and pads by the till, it was as free as a supermarket trolley dash in the ill-lit, dusty corner where the maps lived. My routine seemed foolproof. Like most fourteen-year-olds of the time, my school bag was a long sports effort with a large zip going the full length. Before entering the shop, I’d unzip it and wear it over my shoulder, with my arm held around it, keeping it apparently shut. I was never so stupid as to go straight to the maps; instead, I’d weave a tortuous route under the shop assistant’s eye, picking over fountain pens and ink cartridges, ostentatiously examining maths textbooks, Bibles and anything else that I thought would make me look like some useless swot or a pillar of virtue. While the shop assistant was busy serving someone, I’d dive into the far corner where a huge stand of OS maps sat beckoning. By now, my heart was thumping in my throat, school bag at the ready, unzipped, on the floor. I knew in advance which maps I wanted, and restricted myself to no more than five at a time—well, I didn’t want to be greedy. With a sleight of hand that would have impressed Paul Daniels, I picked the maps in question and swept them with one movement into my bag, covering them with school files or my football shirt. Then I’d get one map off the stand and noisily open it out to examine with rapt attention. Equally ostentatiously, I’d fold it back up again and replace it in the stand. Leaning down to pick up my school bag, I’d quickly zip it up again and hurry towards the till, smiling as casually as I could. Usually, I’d buy a pencil, a biro, a rubber, a cheap book or a sheet of Letraset, just to throw the assistant off the scent, before escaping back into the street with relief and euphoria flooding through me after yet another successful cartographic heist.

As a result of my regular larceny in the Midland Educational Bookshop, my Ordnance Survey collection grew exponentially in a very short space of time. I restricted my looting trips to no more than once a week, although, in what I thought at the time was a genius stroke of alibibuilding, I’d nip into the Midland Ed at other times and flagrantly avoid the map corner altogether. But once a week, the urge for more maps, of more areas, would hold me in its vice-like grip and I’d be in there and seizing the whole of Cornwall or Norfolk in one greedy swoop.

My parents and their mates benefited hugely from my map rustling. By the time I was fifteen, I was the unofficial map library to half of Kidderminster. If anyone was heading off for a weekend in Aberporth or a trip to Auntie Ethel’s in Godalming, it was me they came to for ideas on planning the route and getting the appropriate maps. Little did these upstanding citizens realise that they were handling stolen goods.

Maps have punctuated every twist and turn of my life. During the mental meltdown of early teenage years, my happiest times were spent in the company of my grandmother, touring the Midlands in an aged Ford Corsair with map on my knee and no idea where we were going. I’d be given carte blanche with the navigation, and would take us off down lanes that, from the map, looked worthy of a snoop or which led to places with odd or amusing names. Without knowing it, we were early psychogeographers, conducting our dérive with a flask of tea and a tin of boiled travel sweets. We’d pop into churches, shops and pubs, peer over walls and fences, engage vicars and batty old ladies in conversation, throw sticks in rivers, drive down country roads that looked, from the features on the map, as if they’d afford a bit of a view. When they did, my gran would congratulate me on my map-reading skills and I’d glow with pride and satisfaction, sensations all too rare in my hormonal hothouse.

Many of those trips were anchored by the Fosse Way, the great Roman highway that shoots like an arrow from Lincoln to Exeter. My grandparents lived in Leamington Spa, a short hop away from the Fosse. For most of its course through Warwickshire, the Fosse Way was a B road at best, and unclassified for large parts, despite being fast, straight and well surfaced. With hardly anyone else on it, it was our own private highway to all points north and south, a short plunge into the Cotswolds or the red-brick huddles of Leicestershire. Just north of the village of Halford, in the south of Warwickshire, the Fosse Way changes, in the course of less than half a mile, from an unclassified road (yellow on the OS), through a lightning-brief incarnation as the B4451 (brown), to a fully fledged major road, the A429 (red). I can still recall the electricity of anticipation the first time I spotted this coming up on the map a few miles on. Would this freak three-coloured road show its differences on the ground? I proudly told my gran of my discovery and, to her eternal credit, she showed as much enthusiasm as I did, telling me to let her know when we were crossing the invisible lines. ‘We’re going on to the B road…NOW!’ I hollered, finger almost through the map in excitement. Thirty seconds later, we were at the roundabout where the Fosse transforms once again, this time into a main road, and I was sated. The anomaly has, of course, been ironed out since. No longer is that Warwickshire stretch of the Fosse a gloriously underachieving, knock-kneed road only for those in the know. It’s all B and A now, and doubtless to be heard at every satnav’s monotonous recommendation.

Thirty years on, I find it faintly odd that I have far clearer memories of the way the map looked than practically any other part of those glorious days out, rambling purposelessly but fired with adventure. Even if I only go back twenty years, there’s a bit of a theme emerging: a month’s Inter Railing with a college mate has almost all been excised from my memory save for total recall of the Thomas Cook Rail Map of Europe circa 1988. A decade further yet, I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that I moved to mid Wales in part response to a map I’d been given as a present a year or two earlier, of The Railways, Telegraphs, &c of Great Britain Engraved Expressly For The A. B. C. Railway Guide from 1859. Black threads squirm their way across the country in lavish loops and race-for-the-line competition. Around London, Manchester and the coal seams of south Wales and Yorkshire, the knot of rails threatens to choke the living daylight out of the cities and towns. It’s called a map of Great Britain, but Scotland is sliced off at Aberdeen, so that the one patch of virgin purity, unblemished by angry lines, is the interior of Wales. There’s not one track between Brecon and the Nantlle quarries at Snowdon, nothing west of Oswestry or Leominster. A dotted line of vague intent ambles to Llanidloes, but that’s it. The gaping maw on the map pulled me in as I stared at it above my desk, and way before I really knew why, I had upped sticks to the sticks, a tiny mountain village on the edge of the Snowdonia National Park. It was either that map or a delayed reaction to Ivor the Engine.

My obsession with maps has even given me a strange sort of career. After leaving university, I lasted less than two years in proper jobs, before the urge to take to the open road, with an Ordnance Survey took hold and launched me as a travel writer, producing guide books to the West Midlands, Greater Manchester, Greater Glasgow and Bristol/Bath, and then into the stable of Rough Guide authors. My main work for them was as co-author of the brand new Wales book, though I also wrote various chapters of the early editions of the books on Scotland and England. Most people, on discovering that I was a travel writer, would look insanely jealous, up to the point where I told them that I was writing about Barmouth and Birmingham, rather than Bermuda and Barbados. ‘Couldn’t you get anywhere decent?’ was the stock response. But for me, it was the dream job, and remains so to this day: I love travelling abroad, but, as a writer, have only ever wanted to specialise in the amazingly diverse landscapes and culture of our own islands. Helped, of course, by the maps: my devotion to British mapping, the Ordnance Survey in particular, is so unyielding that exposure to foreign maps leaves me feeling disoriented and slightly perturbed by their inexactitude, harsh colours and inappropriate symbols.

For six years now, I’ve been writing and presenting offbeat travelogues for Welsh television that have allowed me to be as pedantic, opinionated and map-obsessed as I like. Gratifyingly, it’s been the more finicky features on maps, their nomenclature, borders and often strange history that have culled the biggest reaction and audience figures. And not just from gentlemen with fussy little moustaches, either (although there have been a fair few of them, truth be told). There’s a lot of us out there, moustachioed or otherwise.

Maps not only show the world, they lubricate its easy movement. On an average day, we will consult them a dozen times, often almost unconsciously: checking the A-Z, the road atlas or the satnav, scanning the tube or bus map, doing a quick Google online, flying over a virtual Earth, navigating around some retail behemoth on the hunt for a branch of Boots, watching the weather forecast, planning a walk or a trip, visiting a theme park or stately home, conference centre or industrial estate, catching up on the news, booking a holiday or hotel. Maps pepper books, brochures, advertisements, web pages and newspaper and magazine articles: we barely notice them because they do their job so well. They represent practically every area of human existence, conveying, at a stroke, precise information, not just about layout and topography, but history, politics, priorities, attitudes and power. They are the unsung heroes of life, and I want to sing their song.