Kitabı oku: «Map Addict», sayfa 2

Malcolm Saville’s frontispiece map for Wings Over Witchend

1. TREASURE ISLAND

‘Very well,’ said Uncle George. ‘But before you set out we must discover if you can really find your way by the map. You can have a great deal of fun from a map, you know,’ he added. ‘Especially when it comes to life!’

Joanna seemed quite startled to hear this.

˜ H. J. Deverson and Ronald Lampitt, The Map that Came to Life (children’s book from 1948)

Not for us British the wilderness, the outback or the week-long journey on the wide open road. Although folk have gamely tried it, there’s not much of a heroic tale to be told or heart-wrenching ballad to be wrung out of getting your kicks on the A66. The American or Australian relationship with their landscape is a world away from ours. They grab their beers and their buddies, before heading out into the gaping yonder for adventurous rites of passage, laced with deadly wildlife and treacherous topography, under skies that scorch the red earth by day and, by night, fill with fire-sparks twirling lazily into a canopy of stars. How many books, movies, TV series and songs have we all sat through that have ploughed that well-worn furrow? And what’s our equivalent? We go for a nice drive or a bit of a walk on a Sunday afternoon, through a landscape as tame as a tortoise, perhaps take in a stately home or a mouldering ruin, a country pub if we’re feeling rakish. If we really want to push ourselves to the limits of desolation, we might pop on our walking boots, pack some sandwiches and a thermos, and tackle ten miles, and a bit of a stiff climb, in the Peak District or the Lakes—sometimes going so far off the beaten track that we could be as much as an hour from the nearest cream tea. A landscape that has been so thoroughly explored, so comprehensively mapped and so exhaustively written about just isn’t going to throw up any life-threatening challenges. This is not Marlboro Country; it’s Lambert & Butler Land. And that’s exactly how we like it.

The map, spread lovingly over our knees, is the key to unlocking our interaction with what we nobly like to think of as our Great Outdoors. We set out, secure in the certainty that we are using the finest maps in the world: an index of all things possible, albeit all things measured, calibrated and recorded in painstaking detail. There may be no beasts to grapple with and precious little wilderness to explore, but we are quite happy to take our pleasures in far less sensational, less melodramatic ways. Nothing compares with the joy of setting off, not quite knowing where you’re heading, with just a map and a faintly heady sense of adventure to guide you. Sometimes, a nearby name, a shape or a symbol will leap off your Ordnance Survey and demand closer inspection.

On those lovely long childhood explorations in my grandparents’ Ford Corsair, where I’d be sat in the back precociously barking out navigation orders from behind a map, I can still recall the frisson of excitement that coursed through me on spotting, just outside the Warwickshire village of Long Itchington, a thrilling label on the OS: Model Village. These worlds-in-miniature, one of the many idiosyncratic gifts from the British to the rest of humanity, are a near-religious experience for the budding young map addict, and we can all remember our childhood visits to Babbacombe, Tucktonia and Bekonscot, or the much less impressive examples often found wedged between the crazy golf course and a candy floss stall in almost every seaside resort. Off we careered in that Ford Corsair in pursuit of the Long Itchington Model Village, even if none of us had ever heard of it before, which should perhaps have tinkled a distant alarm bell. As we got nearer, my excitement rocketed. ‘Next left!’ I hollered eagerly from the back seat. My gran obediently swung into—oh—a cul-de-sac of drab semis, with a distinctly ordinary county council street sign telling us that this was, indeed, named THE MODEL VILLAGE. It was a small estate built to house workers in the adjacent concrete works. Not a toy train or a miniature town hall in sight. I was deeply disappointed, quite cross and ever so slightly ashamed.

It’s no coincidence that the model village is an almost entirely British phenomenon. Bekonscot, the first and still the finest, has been bewitching its visitors since the 1920s, and still pulls in tens of thousands a year even now, despite being utterly devoid of things that bleep or flash. In fact, that’s its main draw these days: the perfect encapsulation of a long-vanished Enid Blyton England, all stout ladies cycling and butchers in aprons (Blyton was one of Bekonscot’s biggest fans, and even produced a book, The Enchanted Village, about it). It’s not just the miniaturised characters that appeal; it’s the whole experience, even that of arriving. You have to park up in an adjoining car park shared by a small supermarket and a church, then walk down a leafy path to find Bekonscot rooted in a residential side street. As you amble contentedly around the model village in what was once a suburban rockery garden, the stout precincts of Beaconsfield peer over the sensible fences. This Tom Thumb Albion seems so perfectly at home here, steadily, reliably plodding on with the minimum of fuss and the maximum of quiet pleasure.

Mapping and model villages are very British bedfellows. The gentle enthusiasts who created these places, and the generations that keep them going, have all spent long hours mapping their pretend worlds, giving every wood, road, cove, islet and cluster of tiny buildings a name and a whole back history. There’s a curiously devout idealism at work, a desire to create a better, brighter world, even if it’s only for characters just a couple of inches high. Bekonscot’s founder, Roland Callingham, approached his creation with much the same zeal as his contemporary Clough Williams-Ellis. To Callingham, the fact that his kingdom was miniature and Clough’s, at Portmeirion, was (almost) life-sized and for real people made little difference. It was, as Clough put it, a ‘light, operatic’ approach to town planning and design, but there are deadly serious principles at work here too: that humour and grace have a central role to play in our built environment, and will bring out the best in its inhabitants if employed well.

A growing map addiction dictated my juvenile reading habits too. I was inescapably drawn to children’s literature that set itself in places that I could find on the map, places that were unambiguously British, whether it was a real Britain or a parallel fictional one. The appeal of the books soared even higher if they started with a map of the part of the country in which they were set, and there was no shortage of these. At the local library, I scythed through the Malcolm Savilles and Arthur Ransomes, devouring each one in just a day or so, despite the hours spent flicking back and forth between whichever part of the story I was in and the frontispiece map that glued it all together. I’d find the real maps of the areas concerned, and thrill at what the author had included from the actual topography, and what had been a figment of his imagination.

I wish I could say that it was the Arthur Ransome books—Swallows and Amazons et al.—that I loved the most, but no. They were too gungho for my rather prissy tastes, with way too much boat-building, pirate dodging and nautical heartiness. Wild water was a largely absent element in the life of a Midlands schoolboy of the 1970s and ’80s: even the most vivid of imaginations would have had trouble conjuring up Lake Windermere, Coniston or the Norfolk Broads, let alone the high seas, out of our local oil-slicked canals, where you were infinitely more likely to see a dead dog floating by than a home-made raft. I wish I’d taken more to his books because, for starters, they are far better written than anything by Malcolm Saville, and because Ransome himself was such a fascinating character. Recent papers released by the National Archives reveal that he was a spy and possibly a double agent during the Russian Revolution, that he wrote passionately pro-Bolshevik articles for liberal newspapers and managed to get a divorce in the 1920s in order to marry Trotsky’s private secretary, whom he later brought back to the Lake District; they are buried together in the little churchyard at Rusland, near Windermere. Before his hurrah-for-the-Empire children’s books, he’d written a biography of Oscar Wilde and numerous articles that revealed his proud Bohemianism. Unless I was missing some deeply buried subtext, you really wouldn’t know any of this from the simple tales of youthful derring-do that later made him famous.

Sadly, I was much more of a Malcolm Saville kind of boy. By comparison, Saville led a life of unyielding rectitude, informed by a muscular Christianity, a towering snobbery and unquestioning acceptance of the need to obey authority in whatever guise it came. His books were relentless in promulgating these attitudes: policemen, teachers and vicars were always honest and right; anyone who wore a camel coat or dropped their aitches was guaranteed to be a no-good ’un. I lapped them up: although it was partly that I preferred mystery-solving capers to high-seas adventure, the main reason for my choice was, as ever, the maps. Arthur Ransome’s were lavish and lovely, but they were of parts of the country that I neither knew at all nor cared much about. Worse, they seemed ineffably childish, transforming real places into pretend River Amazons, Pirate Islands and Rio Grande Bays, even placing an imaginary Arctic and Antarctic on a plan of what I knew to be a small part of the Lake District. Malcolm Saville, on the other hand, set his stories in some of my favourite places and mapped them with far more appealing realism: those I knew well, like the Long Mynd in Shropshire or the area around Whitby and the North Yorkshire Moors, as well as those I was fascinated by and aching to see, such as the East Anglian coast or Rye and Dungeness on the border of Kent and Sussex. The stories were entirely secondary to their locations and the maps that showed them.

Enid Blyton was a gateway drug to the works of Malcolm Saville, for her books were full of the same jolly adventures in the boarding school halls, the same cast of picaresque ne’er-do-wells, the same crashing morality and class system carved in granite. Mallory Towers was a guilty, girly secret; I could take or leave the Faraway Tree and the Secret Seven, but I devoured the Famous Five books time and again. Saville’s Lone Pine Club members and the Famous Five seemed entirely interchangeable: they were led by identikit sensible boys with side partings, and each had an Amazonian sidekick who hated her girl’s name and insisted on a male equivalent—Peter (Petronella) of the Lone Piners, and every lesbian friend’s first pin-up, George (Georgina) of the Famous Five, with her licky dog, Timmy.

At the age of seven, I worshipped the Famous Five, even if their books suffered from one huge omission. There were no maps, no official sanction of the geography of Kirrin Island, Mystery Moor and all the other places I wanted desperately to believe in. I even resorted to drawing my own, but I knew that they would never feel like the real deal. Where were these places? There was a vague feeling and a few hints that the Famous Five’s romping ground was somewhere in the West Country, but Blyton managed to be sufficiently coy when pressed on the matter. That, though, hasn’t stopped the congenial Isle of Purbeck in Dorset from staking its claim as her muse and setting, and, to be fair, it has a good case. Blyton and her husband had many connections to the district, holidaying three times every year in Swanage’s Grand Hotel and swimming every day in the sea, doing a circuit around the town’s two piers before dinner. They became honorary residents of the district, Enid making it to president of the Swanage Carnival committee, while her husband, Kenneth, bought the Purbeck Golf Club in 1950. The impossibly cute—and congested—village of Corfe Castle, sheltering beneath its famous ruin (Kirrin Castle, apparently), promotes itself as the capital of Blyton country, with the Ginger Pop shop in the main square full of memorabilia, her books, old-fashioned sweets in jars, toys that no modern child would countenance playing with and the inevitable ginger beer. It is said that the PC Plod character in her Noddy stories was based on the village bobby at Studland, which, even in her day, was famous for its nudist beach; Blyton herself is reputed to have gone au naturel there. Thank God the Famous Five never stumbled across it.

In every Saville and Blyton, the format, like the countryside, was reassuringly constant. Everyone would converge for the hols, with aunties that only ever baked or knitted, hoping that their charges weren’t going to get into any scrapes this time, before some funny-looking, funny-sounding strangers arrived in the area to cause mayhem and a minor crime wave that only a gang of hoity-toity children could possibly solve. I, and millions of other small children cooped up in suburban bedrooms, longed for a life as action-packed and exciting, but it never came. Not for want of trying: I went through a phase of combing our local weekly paper, the Kidderminster Shuttle, for crimes to which I could turn my well-read investigative powers. (The Shuttle’s fine name, by the way, comes from the moving part of a carpet loom, in honour of the local industry. The acrid tang of carpet dye hung over the town for most of the year, beaten only in the winter months by the sickly smell from the sugar-beet refinery. It was a long way from breezy Dorset, or even the gloomy heights of the Long Mynd, just thirty-five miles down the road.)

One week, the Shuttle reported a break-in at a coach depot a few streets away. I persuaded my step-brother to join me on a nocturnal raid on the place, to look for ‘clues’. It was only when we hoiked ourselves over the gate and landed in the depot yard that it dawned on me that I wasn’t too sure what a ‘clue’ actually looked like, so we picked up everything, just in case. Weeks later, I found the soggy ball of old bus tickets and fag ends in my coat pocket and realised that we hadn’t managed to solve the crime, despite the bundle of crucial evidence. But at least we’d given the depot yard a nice tidy.

Malcolm Saville’s frontispiece maps were always purportedly drawn by David Morton, the leader of the Lone Piners. Sixteen-year-old David didn’t speak much, but when he did, everyone listened and invariably agreed with him. He was strong of jaw and firm of friendship. And he could draw a great map. Whether I was aching to be him, or be with him, I’m not quite sure, but I took to drawing my own maps that, like David’s, were a hybrid of the real and the imaginary. It was fun improving upon landscapes that I knew, adding in a haunted mansion to replace the golf club, putting in a new railway line, upgrading the parish church to a cathedral, spitefully taking out streets that I found depressing or ugly: there was plenty of choice in 1970s Kiddy.

Logically, I should have ended up as a dorkish (or perhaps Orcish) devotee of J. R. R. Tolkien, for the maps of his vast fantasy landscapes were an essential part of their appeal. Furthermore, Tolkien was a fellow Midlander who’d loved his maps, drawn his own and become fascinated by the otherness of nearby Wales: it was seeing the coal trains, emblazoned with the names of Welsh mines, rumbling through his Birmingham suburb that had first inspired him to enter the world of linguistics, and, to this day, there are those who are convinced that the ethereal gobbledegook of Elvish was based on the Welsh language. Some claim too that his maps of Middle Earth were inspired by the topography of mid and north Wales, fuelling a popular insinuation, best expressed by A. A. Gill, arch-cynic about all things Welsh, that ‘everything [in Wales] that wasn’t designed by God looks as if it was built by a hobbit’. But Tolkien left me colder than a Mordor winter: why invent such elaborate landscapes with such daft names when there were so many fine ones to be had in the real world?

This peculiarly British habit of drawing elaborate maps of fantasy landscapes is perhaps one element of our colonial hangover, for it’s not dissimilar to the way in which we first mapped the real world. Almost all advances in cartography in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries came as a result of our imperial adventures, when British ships plied the four oceans and brought back news—and beautiful new maps—of far-off lands to a wide-eyed population. Although many of the voyages were for trade or for battle, the public interest was more sensationally stoked by the expeditions that set out to fill in the blank parts of the globe, a globe over which Britons were becoming ever more confident of their supremacy. So much of the world was known by now, and it was the bits that remained a mystery—particularly the polar regions and the ‘dark heart’ of Africa—that inspired most fervour, among the public as much as the participants.

It was all done in a joyously British way: with bags of enthusiasm, a smattering of snobbery, a conviction that we knew best and a healthy dose of hit-and-hope optimism. There were many notable victories, but rather more ignoble defeats, to punishing climates, unheard-of diseases and locals who were not as pleased to see the explorers as the latter rather thought they should be. Along the way, the explorers would draw their charts and maps, loyally naming rivers, mountains, creeks and even delirious optical illusions after minor royalty and government officials back home. It wasn’t so far in spirit from those of us who mapped and named our imaginary towns a century and a half later.

Public hunger for news of these expeditions was nigh-on insatiable, and newspaper and periodical editors swiftly realised that an accompanying map of distant conquests was worth a thousand words and produced a sizeable hike in sales. Although the Ordnance Survey had been in existence since 1791, it was run solely as a military arm of the government—quite literally, a Survey for the Board of Ordnance, forerunner of the Ministry of Defence. Their starchy approach was of little interest to the general public and the press, who far preferred the maps of commercial cartographers. The finest ever seen in Britain were by John Bartholomew & Son of Edinburgh.

There’s always a tendency to conflate British and English achievements, though it should be even more stridently avoided than usual in terms of mapping, for both Wales and, to a far greater extent, Scotland had cartographic ambition of their own. Edinburgh, especially, became one of the great centres of map-making during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Bartholomew’s, with its distinctive, blue-covered maps, was the ultimate traditional Edinburgh family firm. Founded by the first John Bartholomew in 1826, the baton was passed down from father to son, each one also called John, until the death of the fifth John in 2008 finally ended the distinguished line. Although the Bartholomew name continues in the mapping division of Collins Bartholomew, it is not as a company that any of the Johns would much recognise. In the 1970s, John the Fifth, together with his brothers Peter and Robert, had, for the first time in a century and a half, brought new blood from outside the family into the company’s management structure. The new blood rather turned on them, forcing the sale of the company to Reader’s Digest in 1985, and thence to News International. It was a terminal move. In truth, though, the end had been steaming towards Bartholomew’s at great speed, for it had slightly lost its path and was in no state to survive the tidal waves of the Thatcher revolution.

It was a long way from the glory years. John the First (1805-61), like his father a jobbing engraver of exceptional ability, had begun to specialise in maps. His were quite gorgeous: the precision of his engraving on the copper sheets created maps of unprecedented accuracy and detail, far better than anything the Ordnance Survey were producing at the time. His first published map, the 1826 Directory Plan of Edinburgh, was lavish and lovely. Looking at it now, what is most remarkable is how little this monumental city has changed in nearly two centuries; aside from the markets and narrow closes cleared for the building of Waverley station, you could easily use it to steer yourself around today.

John the First’s Edinburgh was a cauldron of high artistic and scientific specialism, producing the best reference materials in the world. Out of it came not just Bartholomew’s, but the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, The Scotsman and the publishing houses of Constable and A. & C. Black. Just around the corner from John’s first works was the printing shop of brothers William and Robert (W. & R.) Chambers, later to become mighty publishers of dictionaries and other reference works. Edinburgh was a hotbed of all kinds: the Chambers brothers habitually slept under the counter of the shop, in order to fight off the regular nocturnal raiders.

The firm grew in a typically modest, rather Scottish way; steadily nonetheless. In his first year of business, John earned a total of £78 16s 6d, and by the time of his death in 1861, when John Junior took over the reins, they had about twenty employees and an annual wage bill of over a thousand pounds. John Junior, and his son, John George, combined cartographic excellence with canny business acumen; Bartholomew’s boomed. In that, it had considerable assistance from the mood of the times: maps were the hottest new property and the public had a seemingly insatiable appetite for them. The explosion of the railways was chiefly responsible, from the need for lavish plans and prospectuses to be presented to government and as an incentive for investors, right through to their completion, and the public’s desire to see where these new steam beasts could take them. Each copper sheet would have to have the appropriate parts beaten out on an anvil and reengraved with the new railway, but it was worth every bit of trouble to the map-makers, for the results flew off the shelf.

Then there was the steam revolution on the seas too, necessitating maps of the growing number of commercial and military liners ploughing the oceans, as well as maps of the mystery lands now reachable from the ports of Southampton and Liverpool. The growing Empire needed mapping, while in Britain itself there was the rapidly changing electoral map of a country that was grudgingly allowing more and more people to participate, and, before long, the first leisure maps for those who wanted to pedal into the countryside of a Sunday on their trusty boneshaker. Bart’s also created new markets, particularly of world atlases, for both adults and children. As Rudyard Kipling commented in an address to the Royal Geographical Society in 1928, ‘as soon as men begin to talk about anything that really matters, someone has to go and get the Atlas’. Bartholomew’s reacted to each opportunity with relish and speed, and considerable aesthetic élan.

For the firm’s trump card was not its tight-knit family fortress and sensitive ear to the ground, but the sheer poetic beauty of the maps. Simple, yet packed with information but never too crowded: everything just so (in a Morningside accent). Its most famous original feature was the use of colour shading between contours, through a spectrum of greens for the lower ground, browns for the middle, purple and finally white for the snowy peaks. Bartholomew’s did the same in the areas of sea, with bathymetric contours of ever-darker shades of blue to indicate the deepening fathoms. Although this became a common cartographic tick, no one ever did it better 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 ‘escalator link’ between Bank and Monument, it committed the unpardonable sin of kinking the hitherto ruler-straight Central Line, which used to shoot from Ealing to Mile End, right along Oxford Street, like a bright red harpoon, before veering sharply north into Essex. At least, I suppose, it’s saved generations of inquisitive twelve-year-olds from the crushing anti-climax that I experienced when, on a family trip to London, I peeled off to go and investigate the ‘escalator link’ at Bank-Monument, something that had long intrigued me on the map. Imagining some futuristic subterranean world of travelators and quite possibly a teleportation pod or two, I was cruelly disappointed to find instead a long, dank corridor and a small, clanking escalator.