map addicts are the oddest patriots. Maps bring out a curious British nationalism even in those of us normally allergic to displays of flag-waving. Wherever we go in the world, we pick up a local map and our very first thought is, ‘Hmmm, not as good as an Ordnance Survey.’ We feel sure, we know, that our maps are the finest the world has ever seen. Sneaking in there, too, is the certainty that the landscape they portray is also up there with the very best. We have neither very high mountains, nor very deep ravines nor very wild wildernesses, but the scale—like our climate—is modest and comforting, and the scenery often extremely lovely. And all of it so beautifully mapped.
It’s a force that mystifies me, while still it engulfs me: in absolutely no other aspect of life do I feel so resolutely, determinedly, proudly British. I’ve never voted Conservative (or, God help us, UKIP), bought the Daily Mail, sung ‘Rule Britannia’, stood in a crowd to wave at royalty, watched The Last Night of the Proms with anything other than incredulity or so much as cracked a smile at Last of the Summer Wine. Nearly a decade of living in Welsh-speaking Wales has brought me to the view that the UK as a nation-state might well have had its day, and the sooner we realise it, the better all round. And yet, open up an OS, a Bartholomew, a Collins or even—if nothing else is available—an AA road atlas that cost £2.99 from the all-night garage, and something deep within me trembles. That familiar layout and colouring, those tantalising names and the histories they hint at, the shape of those cherished coasts, the twisting tracks and roads, the juxtaposition of the great conurbations and the wild, empty spaces: a few minutes staring, once again, at the map of this island, or any part of it, and I’m stoked up with a love and a loyalty that knows no reason and no limit.
You have to be careful, though. Not only are there the siren warnings of the pioneers who have gone before, and ended up as wizened, cranky obsessives, but such certainty about British superiority can manifest itself in some pretty strange attitudes, if allowed to seep off the map shelf and into almost any other area of life. Britons are routinely encouraged to cling to the idea that they are, inherently, the best at anything, and if not the best, then at least the most worthy, noble or underrated. And if we can’t be that, we’d rather be the absolute worst: cosmically hopeless, the Eddie the Eagle among nations, usually coupled with a graceless sneer when we lose: ‘Pfft, well, we never wanted it, anyway.’ Rarely are we either the best or the worst, but it’s our actual position of mid-table mediocrity that we struggle hardest to cope with.
Though not when it comes to our maps: even Johnny Foreigner grudgingly admits that we’re still world-beaters in cartography. There is no other patch of land on the planet that has been as comprehensively, and so stylishly, measured, surveyed, plotted and mapped as the 80,823 square miles of Great Britain. We might have been late starters in the game, but we’ve more than made up for it subsequently, especially over the past four hundred years—ever since, in fact, we started needing maps in order to go and rough up bits of the rest of the world and declare them to be ours. Again, this is the perverse dichotomy of the British map aficionado: were it not for the Empire and our military bravado, we would be a great deal further down the cartographic rankings. It’s a dilemma to wrestle with, for sure, but boy, are we grateful for the maps.
James Gillray’s map of England as King George III, crapping ‘bum boats’ into France’s mouth
We always have been, we are, and I hope that we always shall be, detested in France.
˜ The Duke of Wellington
That our cartography is transparently the best in the world is the battle cry of every British map addict. We wave our OS Landrangers in the same spirit that the English longbowmen at Crécy flourished their state-of-the-art weaponry at the French, confident that we are holding the latest, the most accurate, the loveliest maps known to man. And one single fact underpins this whole fabrication, the slender basis for our patriotic fantasy. We must have mapped the world better than anyone, because every measurement, in all its precision, and the whole grid on which every map depends are taken from a base that passes through—and is named after—an otherwise unremarkable suburb of London. Greenwich Mean Time, and the Greenwich Meridian, the world’s cartographic backbone, is ours.
And we don’t have to put our country’s name on our stamps. Same principle. We were first, therefore we were the best and got special privileges.
Take that République Française, with your overly wordy timbrespostes and your redundant meridian, left abandoned and overgrown like a Norfolk branch line closed in the 1960s. And take that USA, for that matter. You may have superseded us in just about every possible aspect of superpower status, but we’ve still got the maps, the clocks and the meridian. It’s a small victory, granted, but it’ll have to do.
To a junior map addict, who gazes at a British map with the fondness of Rod Stewart at a brand new blonde, the certainty that our maps are so good is buried deep within and breaks out in pustules of xenophobic acne. In the 1970s, watching the TV news, I was genuinely and repeatedly surprised to see how developed the rest of the world seemed to be when it flashed past on a nightly basis. Surely, these places couldn’t be as sophisticated as the Land of Hope, Glory and the Ordnance Survey? When, at the age of six, I first visited my mother after she’d moved to France, I couldn’t quite believe that Paris had traffic lights, zebra crossings, decent shops, well-dressed people—people even fully dressed at all. It was Not England; therefore it was supposed to be dusty and primitive. It looked—whisper it quietly—just like home. Only—whisper it even more quietly—rather better.
Ah, la belle France. Our nearest neighbour, archest rival, flirtiest paramour, oldest, bestest friend and bitterest foe, all rolled into one. We and the French are like an ancient, brackish couple locked into what looks from the outside like the stalest of wedlock, but which, behind firmly locked doors, is as doe-eyed as a Charles Aznavour chorus. We sneer at them, but around eleven million of us make our way over the Channel every year to wallow in their wine, cheese and meats of dubious provenance. They sneer at us, but can’t get enough of our culture, either high, in the ample shape of royalty and aristocracy, or low, from punk to getting pissed properly. We look down on them for their pomposity, their flagrantly over-inflated sense of their own importance, their rudeness, their insularity, their ponderous bureaucracy, their clinging to a long-vanished past, their dodgy new best friends, their fiercely centripetal politics, their all-round unwarranted, swaggering arrogance. They look down on us for precisely the same reasons.
It is this intense neighbourly rivalry between Britain and France that has driven most of the advances in mapping over the past four hundred years—or, more specifically, it is the ever-watchful competitiveness between their two capital cities, London and Paris. These citystates in all but name have been peering haughtily at each other across that slender ribbon of water for the past two thousand years. Both are convinced that they are the epitome of all that is civilised and progressive in this world, and both have so much in common—not least their terribly high opinion of themselves.
It’s a rivalry that endures, even constantly reinvents itself, like a family feud that passes down the generations long, long after the original protagonists are cold in the sod. Some of the finest mapping of its age was the by-product, such as the forensically detailed eighteenth-century invasion plans that each side drew up of the other’s nearest coastline during that hundred years or more of semi-permanent war that existed between the two nations until the 1815 full stop—or rather, semicolon—of the Battle of Waterloo. As the nineteenth century progressed, the arena for mutual Anglo-French antagonism was widened, each side having already flexed its muscles in competing for territories
