The British Library’s new exhibition Maps & the 20^th century: Drawing the Line will look at the tumultuous 20^th century through the eyes of maps. It is a period which we recognise as one of incredible highs and unimaginable lows, containing episodes ranging from the pinnacles of scientific achievement to the depths of barbarism. This is an exhibition in which we felt it was important not to airbrush the story of the 20^th century, but to look at how maps (which can themselves be controversial objects) present multiple perspectives upon what happened in those 100 years.

As a result, Maps & the 20^th century will cover a number of aspects of history which some might find difficult or controversial. The first is the inclusion of maps produced in association with war, genocide, humanitarian crises and other episodes which led to suffering and loss of life. As tools of war maps can present a compassion-less and cruel version of the world or, on the other hand, one loaded with emotion. What we have done is to use these maps to try and appreciate these events in the spirit of inquiry and respect.

Maps are ‘children of their times’, and as well as providing singular insights on the past this invariably means that they include language, imagery and perceptions of their times, including some which might appear shocking to a contemporary audience. These can, however, enable a perspective upon the changing values of society.

A handful of important non-western 20^th century maps are included in the exhibition. However, the majority of exhibits are European or North American products, produced for audiences based there. This imbalance is not intended to demean or marginalise important non-western mapping practices. It reflects the reality of the 20^th collections of the British Library, and is testament to the success of the imperial mapping project in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries which eradicated much mapping which did not conform to that idea. Much indigenous mapping was, and continues to be in spoken or otherwise ephemeral form more advanced but more difficult to capture than the maps we will display.

A map annotated according to the Sykes-Picot Agreement, 1915-16.  Map of Eastern Turkey in Asia, Syria and Western Persia. London:  Royal Geographical Society,  1916. Add.MS 88906/25/6

Some of the maps we display will show a version of the world which does not correspond with an understanding of the world held by some people. This might concern the location of a border, or even the named ascribed to some places. Whilst not necessarily aligning with any particular world view shown in a map in the exhibition, our reason for exhibiting is to understand why maps should show one certain world view over another. Understanding the motivations of the mapmaker is one of the key methods of unlocking the past through maps, and this is the aim of Maps & the 20^th century: Drawing the Line.

Our exhibition is simply one of many countless stories of the 20^th century that could be told, but we hope that the maps may allow us to look objectively on the recent past, and in so doing help to inform our future.

Adult colouring books. Leave it to the kids? Whether you’re addicted to them, or bamboozled by their appeal, they’re probably here to stay. Adult colouring atlases (currently for sale in the British Library shop) are particularly interesting, and not so peculiar as you might think because before printed colour came in during the late 19^th century, by hand is exactly how maps were coloured.

It wasn’t so usual to use colouring pencils in, say, the 18^th century. Instead it was usually a water-based paint such as watercolour or the thicker gouache which could provide a brighter and smoother finish.

Daniel Stoopendaal after Isaac de Moucheron, 'Plan or View of Heemstede in the province of Utrecht'. Amsterdam: [N. Visscher], ca. 1700. Maps C.9.e.9.(25.).

There were certainly expert map colourists, for example the artist who coloured prints such as the one above from the British Library's sublime 18th century Beudeker Atlas (online version here). Something to aspire to, colouring book enthusiasts.

But colouring maps wasn’t as glamorous a pastime as you may think. There are rumours, for example, that among others the 19^th century London mapmaker John Tallis used child labour for the colouring of his maps. Looking closely at the outline colour in the map below, I think we can all agree that a gold star was probably not so forthcoming.

John Tallis, 'North America'. From Tallis's Illustrated Atlas and Modern History of the World. London, 1851. Maps 5.e.25.

So when you next find yourself daydreaming as you delicately shade pale pink just the right side of a printed line, spare a thought for those browbeaten children who would likely have had at least 50 atlases to complete before bedtime.

Our exhibition Maps & the 20th Century: Drawing the Line is now open. 

Welcome to Maps & the 20^th century: Drawing the Line, the biggest map exhibition of the decade and the first to showcase the mapping of the ‘cartographic century’.

Heinrich Berann, Atlantic ocean floor. Washington D.C.: National Geographic Magazine, June 1968. Maps CC.5.b.42.

We have selected 200 maps from our collection of 4 million maps, supplemented by a handful of crucial loans) in order to showcase their technological development, their increasing variety, and what they meant to 20^th century western  society

Viewing history through objects is an important way of unlocking our past, and maps are more eloquent than most objects in providing snapshots upon a past that may be just behind us, yet appears like a foreign country.

Lancashire Coalfield. National Coal Board, c. 1983. Maps 188.v.38.

Of course, maps are not always the most reliable witnesses, and we are keen to show how maps shaped perceptions of the world through what they included, what they left out, what they placed in the middle.

John Arthur Carter, This is where I am just now, I’m still ‘on the map’ you see! Eastbourne, c.1914, Maps C.1.a.9.(199).

Drawing the Line will immerse you in an array of 20^th century virtual worlds, from the iconic to the unusual, from the secret to the compelling. You will quite literally step onto a map when you cross the threshold....

... and by the way we’ll be mapping you as you do so.

Jeremy Wood, [My Ghost 2000-2016]. London, 2016. Maps CC.6.a.83. ©Jeremy Wood 2016

A book of the exhibition is published by the British Library and features chapters by Nick Baron, Jeremy Black, Tim Bryars and Mike Heffernan.

View a list of our series of entertaining events

See our schools and adult learning programme

Follow us on Twitter @BLMaps

.. and remember that there is more than one way to read a map.

One exhibition comes down, another one goes up. No matter how many exhibitions I see go into the British Library's PACCAR gallery, I never cease to be amazed by the utter transformation of the space. Our Shakespeare in 10 Acts exhibition which closed in September was a complex and winding space with 10 separate areas for each of the acts. Maps & the 20th Century: Drawing the Line will be entirely different. We're going for the open and expansive look with a handful of open zones. It will be an 'immersive' experience.

Here are some photographs taken over the course of the past few weeks, giving you just enough of a hint to want to see the finished article from Friday.

The view into the gallery a week ago

Still a fair amount to do

 

A few maps starting to appear on walls

 

 One of our more unusual exhibits is installed

 

In the 20^th century maps truly arrived at people’s fingertips. People learnt to read maps and to use them for a wide number of pursuits, especially (though not exclusively) finding their way around.

The Ordnance Survey’s National Map Reading Week initiative is motivated by a concern that people have stopped being able to read maps in this age of automatic mapping (where people are instead increasingly read by maps). There is a strong feeling that map-reading should be a basic life-skill. It is a feeling which arose during the early decades of the 20^th century  as maps became important tools in education and way-finding, as peoples’ horizons widened to beyond their immediate vicinities, and as mobility, tourism and general ‘open-air culture’ became the norm for much of western society.

Henry James Deverson and Ronald Lampitt, The Map That Came to Life. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1948. Cup.1245.aa.53.   

One of the most celebrated 20^th century children’s map reading guides is showcased in our forthcoming exhibition Maps and the 20^th Century: Drawing the Line. Published in 1948, Ronald Lampitt and James Deverson’s The Map that Came to Life follows the story of John and Joanna who use an Ordnance Survey map to walk to town. As they pass over fields, past houses and along footpaths, their surroundings are compared with map adjacent on the same page. The fields turn into contoured blank spaces, houses become black cubes, footpaths dashed lines. Map literacy is acquired by the reader as they accompany the children on their virtual journey, matching map with reality.

In The Map that Came to Life the map is portrayed as an objective, precise and above all truthful mirror of nature. And this inherent trustworthiness enabled maps to become important features of the lives of successive generations of people.  Over time maps became able to serve people with growing ease, particularly thanks to automated mapping and Geographical Information Systems (GIS) from the 1990s.

But was this growing ease without cost? The implications of what commentators such as the historian J.B. Harley felt to be a relinquishing of people’s control over maps were voiced even before the end of the century. But the danger that society could forget how to use maps would have been widely viewed as collateral against the massive pace of positive technological change, if it was thought of at all.

Does the mapping impulse lie dormant but still active within society? National Map Reading Week may tell us whether we really want to find out.

An extremely famous 20th century map made its debut on this day 90 years ago. The illustrator E.H. Shepherd's map of Hundred Acre Wood was included on the endpapers of A.A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh. It would have been the first map many children would ever have seen, committing them to a life of cartographic wonder.

Shepherd's map is one of the most familiar fantasy maps of all time. But as Tim Bryars and I state in our History of the 20th Century in 100 Maps, each fantasy map contains an element of reality. 100 Acre Wood was inspired by Ashdown Forest in Sussex, near Milne's home and which Shepherd visited. It is possible to imagine that clump of trees at the centre of 100 Acre Wood  are still happily growing in that part of southern England.

See the first edition of this famous map in our forthcoming exhibition Maps and the 20th Century: Drawing the Line. 

Fantastic Maps, a celebration of maps in fiction, is an event taking place at the British Library on 10 November. 

 

As the opening of our major exhibition Maps and the 20^th Century: Drawing the Line approaches, it is time to explain the background to the enigmatic globe that has begun appearing in posters and online. It is mysterious hemisphere with a more sinister message, drawn in pastel shades, with relief, place-names, and concentric rings emanating from the globe’s centre: Berlin.

F.E. Manning, Target Berlin. Washington D.C., Army Information Service, 1943. Maps 197.h.1. 

The globe is taken from a United States army poster of 1943 drawn by F.E. Manning and called Target Berlin. It was published in October 1943 when the Allies with the US Air Force had begun a more concerted programme of bombing German cities. Another poster, this time with Tokyo at the centre, was produced shortly afterwards.

F.E. Manning, Target Tokyo. Washington D.C., Army Information Service, 1943. Maps 197.h.1. 

The poster includes a measuring rule which as explained can be used to measure the distance between any place shown on the map and the German capital. However, this was not intended as a navigational chart, but as a propaganda device. It placed Berlin at the centre of US soldiers and air crew minds and gave them confidence in the ruthless and scientific certainty of its destruction.

The Allied bombing of German cities, according to British Air Marshal Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris, aimed at ‘the destruction of German cities, the killing of German workers, and the disruption of civilised life throughout Germany.‘ Bombing of civilians from both sides occurred throughout the war. They were some of the most controversial episodes of the 20^th century, and many consider the line to have been drawn with them.

Maps and 20^th Century: Drawing the Line opens on 4 November. Pre-book tickets here 

Following the Shakespeare exhibition at the BL this summer I thought I would highlight the Lyceum Theatre, one of the London theatres that staged some of the many great Shakespearean productions of the late nineteenth century. Today’s Lyceum differs from how it was 125 years ago, having been rebuilt and altered many times. However, we can see it as it was in 1889 at the height of its fame in maps known as fire insurance plans. 

 

Goad Fire Insurance Plan, Maps 145.b.22 vol.8, sheet 184, 1889

Fire insurance plans are maps compiled to assist companies calculate the level of insurance applicable to property. The best known producer of them, although not the first, was Charles Goad & Co. They produced large scale maps (to the scale of 40 feet to 1 mile) of urban areas; five hundred sheets alone for London! The maps include the footprints, addresses and heights of each building with a commercial, residential and educational use (which of course includes theatres!). The plans used colour to indicate what material each building was constructed from -  pink represented brick or stone and yellow wood.

The maps also showed fire hazards, the number of floors, stair cases and the proximity to a water supply. Water hydrants are marked as blue circles with an H inside.

Side Elevation of the Lyceum Theatre, GOAD Fire Insurance Plan, Maps 145.b.22 vol. 8, sheet 184, 1889

The Lyceum staged many great Shakespearean productions during this period including Othello, Hamlet and Richard III, all with Henry Irving as the leading man. In 1889, Irving ran the theatre and was playing the lead in his revival of Macbeth with Ellen Terry as his Lady Macbeth. Irving and Terry had travelled to Scotland to get ideas for the scenery. The night scenes were lit by torches with great effect but must have been a considerable fire risk. The costumes and props were designed by Charles Cattermole and Ellen Terry’s famous costume was designed by Alice Comyns-Carr. John Singer Sargent attended the first night on 29^th December 1888 and was inspired to paint his famous portrait of Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth. And if this wasn’t spectacular enough Sir Arthur Sullivan wrote the incidental music for the production which included an overture and preludes to several of the acts and also conducted on the first night.

Although the Lyceum Theatre was not destroyed by fire it was fire that directly affected both the future of the theatre and Henry Irving himself.

On 18^th February 1898 a fire broke out at the Lyceum’s rented storage area on Bear Lane in Southwark. The storage was housed under the arches of the London, Dover and Chatham railway line and the fire was so fierce that it burned the structure of the railway arches to a depth of three bricks and turned the coping stones to powder. You can see the location on the plans on the next page.  Two hundred and sixty scenes, two thousand pieces of scenery- the settings for forty four plays were destroyed. Bram Stoker who was the business manager of the Lyceum estimated that the cost price of the destroyed stock was £30,000.

Unfortunately to make matters worse Irving had, as an economy measure, reduced the insurance cover just months before. Irving and the Lyceum carried on bravely but the golden period was over.

In 1902 the London County Council demanded structural alterations be made to the theatre against fire risks. The funds were exhausted.   After being bought by Thomas Barrasford,  in 1904 the theatre was rebuilt in rococo style by Bertie Crewe retaining only the façade and portico of the original building. Irving continued to tour until his death in 1905.

Bear Lane, Goad Fire Insurance Plan, Maps 145.b.22, volume 10, sheet  246, 1889

If you would like to see the original of these plans which includes towns and cities in Great Britain, Canada and across the World contact the Maps Reference Team at the British Library.

Nicola Beech