The Lay of the Land
Field Note No. 002
15th August 2026
On maps, place & the importance of knowing where you are.
There is an old ammunition box in The Bureau containing somewhere approaching a hundred maps.
This is less alarming than it sounds.
They are mostly Alan Godfrey Editions: reproductions of old Ordnance Survey maps covering towns, villages and cities across Britain at various points in their history. They have accumulated over years of research and are kept together in the ammunition box for no more complicated a reason than they fit rather well.
They are also used.
That distinction is worth making. I like old maps enormously as objects in their own right. Good cartography can be extraordinarily beautiful, and the Ordnance Survey represents a remarkable exercise in recording the physical landscape with almost obsessive precision. There is considerable pleasure to be had simply unfolding one and looking at it.
The collection has grown according to a fairly simple rule. Whenever a place new to my research appears, I check the ammunition box to see whether I already have suitable map coverage for the location and period. If I don't, the Alan Godfrey catalogue is consulted and the closest available sheet, or sheets, are ordered.
I should admit that discovering a gap in the collection is not entirely unwelcome. It usually means that, before long, another familiar brown envelope will arrive on the doormat of The Bureau.
But these are tools of the trade.
Genealogical research has a tendency to reduce places to words. An address appears on a census return. A street is recorded on a birth certificate. A place of employment appears in a directory. A parish is entered into a register.
It is very easy to record the information and move on.
A map asks you to look around.
Where exactly was the house? What stood behind it? How far was the walk to the church where the children were baptised? Where was the school? The railway station? The factory? The public house? The workhouse? What separated one address from another?
Sometimes the answer provides useful context. Occasionally it provides part of the answer to the research itself.
People did not live in databases. They lived in places.
I use digital mapping extensively and would not willingly surrender it. Being able to move between historic and contemporary landscapes, sometimes almost instantaneously, is an extraordinary research facility and one I use regularly.
The paper map has not therefore been retained out of suspicion of the digital world.
Quite the opposite.
Digital and analogue methods sit perfectly happily beside one another on the same desk. One does things the other cannot. The important question is not whether a tool is old or new, but whether it helps establish something useful.
There is, nevertheless, something reassuringly permanent about paper.
No subscription expires. No service is withdrawn. No poor internet connection prevents a map printed from the 1899 Ordnance Survey from telling me that where a modern postal depot now stands there was once a copse.
The information remains where it was put.
Some sheets in the ammunition box are particular favourites.
There is Newport Pagnell, 1899, my home town. Familiar streets become unfamiliar again as later development disappears and the town retreats towards an earlier footprint.
There is Bethnal Green & Bow, 1870. That one is difficult to look at merely as lines on paper. The streets are packed tightly with terraced houses, courts and tenements. With a little knowledge of the people who inhabited them, the map begins to acquire noise. Silk weavers, costermongers and matchbox makers occupied those streets. The map does not record their voices, but it shows the physical world in which those voices were heard.
Then there is Bradford-on-Avon, 1885, a coloured edition and a particularly beautiful thing.
The River Avon divides the town, but it also explains it. Dye works and mills sit beside the water on which their industries depended. Streets, buildings, industry and landscape cease to be separate pieces of information and become part of the same place.
And there are others.
The meadows around East Dereham in 1926. The heathlands of Breckland in 1907, a landscape whose history reaches back to the drifting sands and bitter winters of the seventeenth century. Pre-war Putney, its terraces and tentacles of railway spreading between great areas of open ground. The London Orphan Asylum standing in comparative isolation on the fringes of Watford, where the map seems to empty out.
Different places. Different years. Each caught for a moment before the landscape moved on.
That is what a good historical map does particularly well.
It restores context.
And not everything learned from one needs to belong to a formal investigation.
There is a small wood in the farmland through which I regularly walk the dogs. To anybody passing it today, it is simply a small wood in a field.
On the old maps it has a name.
Old Covert.
The surrounding landscape was once hunting country, and something I had walked past countless times without particular thought suddenly acquired a history and an identity.
Nothing about the wood itself had changed.
Only what I knew about it.
Perhaps that is why the maps remain such useful companions to genealogical research. A historical record tells us that somebody lived at a particular address, worked in a particular place or died in a particular building. A map allows us to put that fact back into its surroundings.
The landscape may subsequently have altered beyond recognition. Streets disappear. Fields become housing estates. Factories become flats. Railway sidings become car parks. A copse becomes a postal depot.
The map keeps its appointment with a particular moment.
Unfold one and, for a while, the place is still there.
Which is why somewhere approaching a hundred of them remain in an old ammunition box in The Bureau.
And why there will almost certainly be a hundred and one.
