‘Dreaming o’er the Map’: The Early Ordnance Survey and Those who Loved It

Dr Rachel Hewitt

Dr. Rachel Hewitt is a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow in the School of English and Drama at Queen Mary, University of London. She was previously a Research Fellow at the Research Centre for Literature, Arts and Science at the University of Glamorgan. She completed a doctoral thesis at Queen Mary, after finishing a Masters and BA at the University of Oxford, both in English Literature. Her first book, Map of a Nation: A Biography of the Ordnance Survey, was published by Granta in October 2010, and won first prize in the Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Awards for Non-Fiction.

The Ordnance Survey is Britain’s national mapping agency. Today its vast digital database provides geographical information to a wealth of consumers, and its folded orange Explorer maps and pink Landranger maps are beloved of Britain’s ramblers, walkers and cyclists. But the impulses that lay behind the Ordnance Survey’s foundation in 1791 were very different from outdoor leisure pursuits. The Ordnance Survey was established in the wake of the French Revolution’s outbreak, to aid military defence against a possible French invasion. Nevertheless, the mapping project’s earliest directors always hoped the Ordnance Survey would assume a place in Britain’s heart, to become ‘the honour of the nation’. This lecture will describe how the Ordnance Survey was much more than a military map, and was a focus of reflection for many who wrote, painted and dreamt about the British landscape.