Map of the Nation: A History of the Ordinance Survey by Rachel Hewitt (2010)
Read: June – July 2011
I asked for this book for Christmas as it had got brilliant reviews in the paper and was being featured all over the place. I don’t know why but I’ve always loved maps and so it was an obvious choice to get and read this book. I understand that the book is essentially Hewitt’s PhD and is essentially a biography of the ordinance survey from the first mapping exercises in the UK until the whole of the country had been (accurately) mapped at two scales. It covers the politics, the process and the people.
I found it hard going at first to get into the book and digest the contents. It was very dense and slow moving to cover the earliest mapping stages in the UK. I have read a few other books about mapping in the UK and I found these better described the mapping process, for example using the the chain measurement. Hewitt’s though covered the politics and the people better; describing how policy changes and political ambitions drove the first accurate maps to be produced. A really interesting aspect of the book was of course the issue of accuracy and about half way through (the book, not the mapping process) they discovered the need for maps of different scales and the need for locally verifying name places.
It was the second half of the book that I enjoyed most – politics of completing the maps and the discussions on local verification and scale. Having read similar books before this book only added some new things to my understanding – not quite as much as the hefty weight of the hardback added to our luggage weight coming back to the UK this summer. I’ve now gifted the book to G.
