when the tired, tatty—and increasingly impossible to sell—houses finally give way to the dispiriting landscape of international aviation: the pavement-less roads clogged with traffic, the giant hangars, mysterious metal buildings housing anything from security firms to haulage companies, car parks galore, miles of razor wire, CCTV whirring and winking in every direction and a collection of hotels that no one, surely, has ever spent a second night in.
Heathrow Airport only came into existence thanks to government sleight-of-hand at the end of the Second World War. The site, on the richest agricultural land in the country, was commandeered under Emergency Powers in 1943, purportedly for the RAF. It was never used as such. The then Under-Secretary of State for Air, Harold Balfour, revealed in his autobiography that the requisition and construction work undertaken were entirely bogus, and that the plans had always been to turn the airfield into London’s principal civil airport come the end of hostilities. Playing the national emergency card simply allowed the authorities to circumvent any normal planning procedures—and so the pattern continues.
Even Major-General William Roy fell foul of the airport zealots’ economy with the truth. When the never-to-be-used RAF base was being built in 1944, the memorial cannon that marked the north-western end of his base line was removed, in a theatrical attempt to demonstrate that no impediment—even one just five feet tall—should be placed in the way of our magnificent men in their flying machines. Sense eventually prevailed, and the cannon was returned in 1968, and finally replaced in its original position four years later, where it still squats. It’s not easy to locate: indeed, the irony is that you need a bloody good map to find it. Tucked away in a grassy corner nibbled out of a long-stay car park, the cannon sits alone and unloved, overlooking the airport’s main police station and the northern perimeter fence. You’d hardly notice it, especially compared with the huge banner that hangs off the car park fence above it: ‘Exclusive Parking: Park Today. Complimentary 15 Minute Spa Treatment’—well, who wouldn’t want a rub down from a car park attendant? In Paris, you suspect that a monument this significant would have been turned into a vast pyramid, visited by coachloads of schoolchildren by day and extravagantly flood-lit by night.
I paused, gulped down a little more airborne diesel, and felt strangely proud of the British way.
The original index map for the OS 1:50 000 series: there’s Aysgarth, but no Sheffield
Ordnance Survey maps in all their shapes and sizes are the most beautiful manifestation of twentieth-century British functional design. Ever since I can remember, I have spent stolen moments, wasted evenings and secret hours studying the mystery and beauty of the Ordnance Survey maps of these islands. The concrete trig points that had originally been used in their creation became almost as powerful in mystical properties for me as standing stones.
˜ Bill Drummond, 45
Grimsby and Cleethorpes. Could there be a more inauspicious debut to a lifetime’s obsession? It was 1974 and the Ordnance Survey had just published its first swathe of new 1:50 000 maps, the metric replacement for the longstanding, much-loved one-inch system that had divided the country since the very first map in 1801. Whether it was their eye-catching colour (a goutish pinky-purple) or stark 1970s visual functionality, I don’t know, but as soon as I saw the new maps in W. H. Smith, I was hooked. I wanted them, and before I discovered how easy they were to steal, I was even prepared to save up my pocket money to get them. The going rate in our family was 2p for every year of your age, earning me a princely 14p every week. The maps were 65p each, so it took some saving—and some serious creeping to grandparents.
The 1:50 000 series (the ‘Landranger’ title only appeared in 1979) is the best range of general-use maps in the world. The whole of Great Britain is carved into 204 squares, each one a 40 × 40 km portrait of its patch of land. The variety is breathtaking: from map number 176 (West London), which is covered in the dense stipple of cheek-by-jowl population, covering the homes of perhaps 4-5 million people, to map number 31 (Barra & South Uist, Vatersay & Eriskay), where nine-tenths of the map is pale blue sea, and the rest just a few straggling islands of the Outer Hebrides, home to no more than a couple of hundred hardy souls.
I love every aspect of these maps: the clarity and efficient good sense of their colour scheme, their neat typography and lucid symbolism, the fact that they are at precisely the right scale to include every lane, track, path and farmhouse, every nodule and bobble of the landscape, yet cover a sufficiently large area to afford us a one-glance take on the topography of a substantial part of the country. Even the 1970s cover plan, a stylised square summarising the area to be explored within, has a pleasing visual economy, the size of the settlements upon it indicated by the depth of boldness of the type: darkest for the largest towns through to ghostly light for the villages. In the early days of the new series, before the marketing men decided to plaster the cover with a tourist board shot of somewhere on the map, the cover plan filled the map’s purple front: bold, clean and perfectly in keeping with the times. A lifelong OS collector-turned-dealer told me of the ‘moment of conversion’ that ignited his passion on unfolding a One Inch map for the very first time nearly half a century before, his captivation with the beauty and elegance of an Ordnance Survey map. Most OS aficionados can remember their own such moments of epiphany, when a lifetime’s love was, in an explosive moment of clarity, mapped out before them. And so very well mapped, at that.
The modernist mania for streamlining was evident in the new 1:50 000 map series, and not just in the cool lines and clear typeface of the covers. One of the all-new features of the maps was that everything was metric. The old one-inch (to one mile) scale, itself a masterstroke of simplicity, translated in metric terms to the rather more cumbersome 1:63 360. Expanding the scale slightly meant that the maps looked less crowded, and that each grid square, an orderly 2 × 2 cm, represented one kilometre. Not that you ever heard anyone refer to them as the ‘2 cm to 1 km’ series. It was—and is still—the ‘one and a quarter inches to the mile’.
Contours had to be translated into metric measurements too, and this produced one of the series’ daftest anomalies that remained obstinately in place for years, until the whole country’s height differentials could be re-surveyed and re-plotted at ten-metre intervals. As the key next to the map put it: ‘Contour values are given to the nearest metre. The vertical interval is, however, 50 feet.’ In other words, contours were merely renumbered metrically, making the gap between them a decidedly forgettable 15.24 metres. Thus, instead of a hill rising through 50, 100, 150, 200 feet and so on, it was now growing through 15, 30, 46, 61 and 76 metres. Things got even sillier the higher you went. Then there was the potential confusion in some of these odd contour measurements: 61, 91, 168, 686, 869, 899, 991 and 1,006 metre lines could all be misread upside down. Therefore it was decreed that such figures could only be placed on contours on the south-facing slopes, so that the numbers would be the right way up. As a result, you had to follow your finger round an awfully long way on some of the hills, the higher ones in particular. That said, anyone who thought that there were contour lines of 9,001 metres to be found in Britain should have been banned from going anywhere near a map.
There were very few contours on Grimsby & Cleethorpes, 1:50 000 map number 113. This really was the very first map that I frittered away my pocket money on, at the tender age of seven. I took it into school, hoping to impress everyone. Unsurprisingly, the ploy failed; as I unfurled the portrait of distant Humberside to a small crowd, there was puzzled silence and then a small voice piped up, ‘So where’s Kiddy on that, then?’ The realisation that others failed to share my enthusiasm, or even to understand the concept that there was a whole big country out there that Kidderminster wasn’t a part of, was crushing, but it didn’t deter me. Before long,
