Map Addict. Mike Parker
than the company that first introduced it in 1880, and it remained Bartholomew’s signature until the final maps limped out just over a century later. This was thanks to perhaps the greatest John, number three, John George (1860-1920), who was utterly obsessive about colour harmony, and not just on his maps. When postage rates rose from a penny to a penny halfpenny, he despised the shade of brown adopted for the new 112d stamp, and insisted on using a penny red and a halfpenny green instead.
In the nineteenth century, the cartographic establishment was a fearsome beast, and it didn’t take well to the rather dour, shy Scotsmen and their surprisingly flash commercial ways. The firm resisted takeovers and mergers, even from John George’s relative by marriage, map-maker George Philip of Liverpool. The first great map mavericks, they refused to countenance the business leaving the family, or even leaving Edinburgh. They were also notoriously poor of health, and often ascribed some of their business success to this very fact, for they believed that disabled people made the finest cartographers, if only because they were less likely to move around so much, and were thus able to maintain the extreme concentration demanded by the job.
Bartholomew’s most celebrated map—the Times Atlas excluded—was its Half Inch series, originally marketed as the Reduced Ordnance Survey, after John the Second had hammered out a deal with the government’s own map-makers and before the Copyright Act of 1911 forbade such a practice. God-fearing, sober and unable to come up with any name more exciting than John they may have been, but they weren’t averse to some fierce self-promotion, if it sold one more map. When, in the early 1890s, John George moved the company into a splendid new building by Holyrood Park, he grandly christened it the Edinburgh Geographical Institute. Less impressively, it was located on a street called the Gibbet Loan, which John George felt detracted from its address. No problem if you’re the city’s most revered map-maker, however. He simply changed it on the next map of Edinburgh to the altogether more elegant, if anodyne, Park Road, the name by which it is still known, and mapped, today.
It was through the blue Half Inch series that I was first introduced to Bartholomew’s as my map addiction flourished through the 1970s. They had a striking but slightly old-fashioned quality to them, and I quickly came to associate them with the bookshelves of elderly relatives and the smell of beeswax. I was Mr Now in my map choices, an enthusiastic consumer of the brand new metric OS sheets in their dazzling pinky-purple covers. Thanks to the soft poison of nostalgia, now that they’re no longer produced, I find Bart’s maps absolutely charming, and can admire their clarity, precision and use of colour for hours. In their heyday just prior to the First World War, they outsold the Ordnance Survey’s own Half Inch by at least ten to one, so far eclipsing them that the OS eventually killed their own series and focused instead on the one-inch scale. Bartholomew’s was outshone in its turn too, eventually. Sales started to dip badly throughout the 1970s: after all, why buy a host of separate maps, when each one costs nearly as much as a road atlas of the entire country at a scale that is only slightly less? The Bartholomew list was trimmed extensively in the 1980s, with only popular tourist areas such as the Lake District and the south-west peninsula getting updated. Even that wasn’t enough to staunch the haemorrhage of sales, however, and the whole series was quietly pensioned off at the turn of the final decade of the twentieth century.
On the international stage, Bartholomew’s finest hour came in its production of the mighty Times Atlas of the World, still regularly cited everywhere as the finest atlas available. There had been two previous editions, in 1895 and 1900, published by The Times newspaper in London, before Bartholomew’s came on board in 1920 and transformed the book into the beautiful ogre we now know and love. Even in these days of such intricate online mapping, the Times Atlas, with its enormous pages and crystal clear cartography, is more than maintaining its value, and is likely to do so long after other paper maps have been blown away.
If the Times Atlas has shouldered all global opposition out of the way by dint of its sheer heft, then the prize for pared-down elegance and practicality must go to that other great British cartographic icon. Arising from far more lowly beginnings, Harry Beck’s 1933 map of the London Underground has been emulated and impersonated all over the planet. It is a masterstroke of simplicity, stripped of all surplus information and conveying everything it needs to in the most efficient way possible. Beck realised that, once you were on the tube, your real geographical position was of no great consequence; all you needed to know was the names and order of the stations and where the lines intersected. All surface-level features, save for the River Thames, were cleared from the map. Basing his design on an electrical circuit diagram, with all lines at either 90° or 45° angles, he first took it to the Underground’s publicity department in 1931, who turned it down for being too revolutionary. Two years later, he tried again and it was accepted, with some trepidation. No need: the public loved it, and have continued to do so ever since.
In fact, as a nation, we’re obsessed with this map, more so than it perhaps deserves. Don’t get me wrong; it’s good, very good indeed, even if it’s not been quite right ever since 1991, when they dropped Bank station down a bit to merge with Monument and the new Docklands Light Railway extension. Not only did this consign to the bin the legendary
Woe betide anyone whose adoration of Harry Beck’s tube map encourages them to attempt any kind of homage to it. In 2006, a self-confessed tube geek produced a quite inspired version of his own, each station faithfully rendered into an accurate anagram. Some were strangely apposite: Crux For Disco (Oxford Circus), Sad Empath (Hampstead), Written Mess (Westminster), Swearword & Ethanol (Harrow & Wealdstone) and the faintly creepy Shown Kitten (Kentish Town). Some were plain daft or bawdily Chaucerian: A Retard Cottonmouth (Tottenham Court Road), Pelmet (Temple), Burst Racoon (Barons Court), This Hungry & Boiling (Highbury & Islington), Wifely Stench (East Finchley) and Queer Spank (Queens Park). His map lit up the internet, getting over 30,000 hits in the first few days. And then the lawyers muscled in. If you Google it, you will find it, but only after coming across numerous pages telling you: ‘Content removed at the request of Healeys Solicitors acting on behalf of Transport for London and Transport Trading Ltd.’
Transport for London, whose predecessors paid Harry Beck just ten guineas for his original work, have been more than happy to license the tube map for an unholy array of tacky souvenirs. The anagram map’s creator has publicly stated that he doesn’t want any payment for it, but he wants it to be freely distributed. The idea has been picked up by artists the world over for their own transport systems. But still TfL are attempting to excise the map from cyberspace, a task only marginally less futile, and impossible, than trying to push toothpaste back into the tube. The map is a wonderful work of art: humorous, striking, colourful, beautiful. It makes Simon Patterson’s much-lauded, Turner Prize-nominated Great Bear, a Beck map where the stations are replaced with the names of artists, writers and composers, look very limp indeed. Patterson’s original was bought by the Tate, and limited prints have been snapped up for tens of thousands, by Charles Saatchi among others. It has made an awful lot of money, with full support from TfL. But then they do get 50 per cent of the proceeds, which—on the bright side—at least means that not all of their lawyers’ fees to pursue pointless causes have to come from the money you paid for your Travelcard.
It’s no coincidence that the two most lionised British maps, each dripping with myth and adoration, subjects of a glut of books, blogs and websites, are Harry Beck’s tube map and Phyllis Pearsall’s London A-Z