Don’t you worry your pretty little head, lady…
8. BOYS’ TOYS?
The modern male driver sits behind the wheel, hands his wife a map and asks her to navigate. With limited spatial ability she becomes silent and starts turning the map around and feels incompetent. Then she tries to identify something on the horizon that resembles something on the map. Most men don’t understand that if you don’t have specific areas in the brain for mental map rotation, you’ll rotate it in your hands. It makes perfect sense to a woman to face a map in the direction she is travelling. For a man to avoid arguments, he should avoid asking a woman to read a map.
˜ Allan and Barbara Pease, Why Men Don’t Listen & Women Can’t Read Maps
Go to any map fair, convention or gathering of enthusiasts, and the first thing that strikes you is the almost complete absence of women. While hardly hotbeds of testosterone, such occasions only seem to confirm the prejudice that maps are boys’ toys, too technical, too dry and too rational for the esoteric tastes of the ladies. I’ve just waded through the entire membership list of the Charles Close Society, the fan club for Ordnance Survey maps, to see what the gender split was there. Out of the six hundred or so members, I could positively identify only twenty-six as female.
‘As many as that?’ said Charles Close Society founder (and member number one) Dr Yolande Hodson when I told her the figure. ‘I’m surprised. I suspect a good many of those twenty-six are map librarians. They tend to be women, you see. They might be very good librarians, but they’re not collectors of maps. They don’t usually have any real enthusiasm for them. Most women can’t read maps, after all.’ I was thunderstruck to hear our most eminent female map addict dismiss the rest of her sex in such forthright terms. If Dr Hodson is right, she herself is a glorious exception to the rule. Her entire professional career has been in maps, working in the British Library’s Map Library, the Military Survey (charged with providing the armed services with the best geographic and geodesic information available) and as an historian, curator and author, particularly on matters to do with the Ordnance Survey. Her knowledge of the early years of OS is second to none, and she confessed to me that her ambition in the afterlife is to find OS founding father William Roy, a lifelong bachelor, and marry him. If anyone could tame the old bugger, it’s Yolande. She is acutely aware of how few ardent map enthusiasts are women, often finding herself as the lone female in any cartographic gathering. As with most of us, her love of maps ignited at an early age; she says about eight years old. ‘If we went on a walk, I’d always come back and draw a map of where we’d been. I adored the graphic representation of spatial relationships, and that you could use a map to peel back the various layers of information.’
Yolande Hodson is doubly rare, in that she not only is a map addict (she has three different versions of the entire OS 1:50 000 Landranger series, which is, after all, only a little over thirty years old), but an avid collector. ‘Women,’ she said, ‘don’t tend to have collections in the same way that men do. Not just of maps, but of anything.’ She is stout in her defence of the extreme map ‘anoraks’ (a label she’s happy to share) who get, to my eyes, unnecessarily hot and bothered about things like edition numbers and tiny changes in cover illustrations. ‘We map historians rely on that level of detailed, obsessive scholarship,’ she says. Fair point.
I tell her of a recent Women’s Institute meeting, at which I was the guest speaker. The branch was in a small Montgomeryshire village, with an attendance of about a dozen ladies and some fabulous sponge cakes. After my spiel, one of the members asked me what I was working on at present. ‘A book about maps,’ I replied, fully—and condescendingly—expecting the revelation to cause collective eyes to glaze over and precipitate a stampede to the bara brith. Instead, it kickstarted quite a discussion. At least half of the women present were dedicated map enthusiasts, each of them speaking lovingly of the maps that had meant most to them over the years. One lady said, ‘It’s such a pity that they don’t do Bartholomew’s maps any more. I always preferred those to the Ordnance Surveys.’ Quite a few heads nodded at that one. When I told her this, Yolande laughed. ‘Well, of course. Women liked Bartholomew maps because they were so beautifully artistic. Their special appeal to women helped make them a real threat to the sales of Ordnance Surveys. Don’t forget that, at the beginning of the twentieth century, a typical Bartholomew’s print run on a map was about ten thousand, against five hundred to a thousand for a comparable OS. Women played a large part in that.’
Among my friends and relatives, many of the good map-readers are women, and I’ve hardly ever encountered the proverbial hopeless female who looks at an Ordnance Survey as if it is an impenetrable equation in quantum physics. My suspicion is that map-reading is in the same category as driving, an area of life that’s perceived to be more masculine, and therefore one in which men cling to the belief that they are better than women, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Just as it is men who you’ll find slobbering over all the car magazines in Smiths, having interminable pub conversations about horsepower and torque, or willingly paying twenty quid to hang out in a vast shed on the outskirts of Birmingham just to lust over cars they haven’t a hope in hell of ever owning, so it is with the lower-octane cartographic equivalents. Most women, however much they appreciate maps, are not going to bother joining a society to prove it, much less trek halfway across the country to make map-talk with others and browse through a few boxes of musty Geographias. That’s what the boys do, and as far as most women are concerned, it’s a fine way of keeping them out of trouble. I say ‘them’; of course, I mean ‘us’.
Allan and Barbara Pease, however, are adamant that women cannot read maps, and that you’d be a fool to ask them to try. According to them, it’s all down to factors that haven’t changed since we were living in caves, namely very different spatial awareness in the comparative brains of men and women, together with different fields of vision. The left-right split in the brain is less pronounced in women, thanks to a thicker nerve tube (the corpus callosum) connecting the two sides. This gives women greater intuitive powers and a superior ability to multitask. Men, by comparison, with their spindly little corpora callosa, can only concentrate on or do one thing at a time. However, when that one thing is reading a map and navigating, they do it well. Likewise, with regards to what we see and how we see it, the Peases state that men, true to our hunter-gatherer origins, tend towards tunnel vision or extreme focusing on one thing, while a woman has far wider peripheral vision, ‘so that she could monitor any predators sneaking up on the nest’.
Like most clichés, the one about women having to turn the map upside down if they’re travelling south has some considerable truth to it. It’s something I’ve witnessed on a few occasions—and, if I’m honest, slightly sniggered at—but never particularly thought it to be of any great significance. As long as a navigator can get you to your destination, who cares how they do it? But this is a subject that gets people very excited indeed. In 1997, young Derby inventor Ashley Sims had the idea for an upside-down map of Britain, not as a Scotland For Ever! piece of bravado, but as a pure navigational aid. He produced a prototype: on one side, the country was mapped in the familiar way, with north at the top, and, on the other, it was inverted, with south uppermost. On both sides, names of towns and villages and road numbers were the right way up, so that, whether you were heading north or south, you had an easily legible map going in the same direction that needed no huffing, puffing and turning around.
Ashley took his idea to W. H. Smith and Waterstone’s, but neither was interested. In fact, both were loftily dismissive of it as little more than a one-minute gimmick, a cutesy joke in a section of their retail empires not much accustomed to humour. But, in both cases, it was only male executives that he saw. After his double rejection, Ashley was contacted by a female executive from W. H. Smith, who hadn’t been present at the meeting. She’d heard the idea from one of her colleagues and had got it immediately. Under her tutelage, Smiths took on the project, and the Upside Down Map (and then Upside Down Road Atlas) of Great Britain were born. They received massive publicity: a few ‘and finally…’ TV news pieces and similarly wry press coverage. The Daily Mail ran a story about the map and offered a free copy to the first hundred people to write in. They had fifteen thousand requests—all but a tiny handful from women. Ashley went on to publish upside-down maps of other places; the series sold over 300,000 copies before his Dutch publisher went bust and took the series with them.
Ironically, the muse for Ashley’s map was a man: his father John, a trucker. Returning from Scotland to Derby one day, his dad grew furious with trying to work out the route home. ‘If you turn the map upside down, the place names are unreadable and if you read the map backwards in the direction you are driving, right-hand turns and places are on the left and vice versa. Travelling north I had no problems. But I found the long journey back with the same map very difficult. I couldn’t understand why anybody hadn’t printed a map the other way round to eliminate the problem.’ So Ashley did. The experience set him up with a hunger for some other cracking ideas; since the upside-down maps (a concept that he thinks is now redundant, thanks to the ubiquitous satnav), he’s gone on to invent Jellyatrics (jelly babies in the shape of pensioners, to celebrate the popular sweet’s eightieth birthday), Proofers (paper tabs that can be placed in drinks to test for the presence of date-rape drugs) and make films about the peregrine falcons of Derby Cathedral and the bikers of Matlock Bath. That’s what you call a proper bloke’s progression through life: get madly absorbed in one thing for a while, then wear it out before galloping off to the next. It’s one of the things I always loved my dad for, the swift succession of hobbies that he hurled himself into with such gusto: the town fête, the church youth club, homebrewed beer, grape-growing for Château Kidderminster wine, the twin-town association, camera club, gardening club, Man in the Kitchen classes at the local FE college, coaching paralympians, tracing the family tree. Some of his crazes have had more effect on the family than others. The stench of boiling hops clung to us all during his homebrew phase, though that was nothing compared with the disruption that came from his sudden dedication to the local brass band. He’d never played any instrument before, and, not one to duck a challenge, took up with a tuba as his debut. If I read a passage from any of the books that I studied for A level, I can still hear the booming, tuneless fart of tuba scales in the kitchen below me and feel the floorboards shake in consternation. Unlike my dad, I’ve not been much of a serial hobbyist, unless you count the maps, of course. That’s never been a red-hot fling, though; always the steady relationship, with its many ups and downs, but long settled into companionable quiet.
Women (and only women) swivelling maps round to face the direction in which they are travelling has become the most regular comedy leitmotif for men who are convinced that they have the monopoly on cartographic savvy. In 2007, the psychology department at the University of Warwick published an analysis of the findings from a huge BBC online poll, in which 198,121 people participated (109,612 men and 88,509 women). The principal thrust of the study was to see how ageing affects cognitive and spatial awareness, but you’d never have known that from the resulting media coverage. That focused instead on the very unsurprising finding that ‘men outperformed women on tests of mental rotation and line angle judgment, whereas women outperformed men on tests of category fluency and object location memory’. Or, as the papers and virtually all of the male blogosphere had it: ‘Women can’t read maps, but at least they’ll be able to find the car keys.’
The headlines were further sensationalised by the inclusion within the test, not just of gender, but of sexual identity too. That produced the result that when it came to the mental rotation of cuboid objects that look like overgrown Tetris blocks, there was a definite hierarchy of ability: heterosexual men first, then bisexual men, gay men, lesbians, bisexual women and, lastly, heterosexual women. The red-blooded papers loved that, and cheered it to the rafters like a drunken rugby team: the Daily Telegraph headlined their story about the report ‘Needing Directions? Men, Stay Straight’. Of all the tests, this was the one that was most identified with the ability to read a map, for that demands the skill of being able to translate an image from two dimensions into a mental picture of it in three, which can then be rotated and turned in the brain. Having tried the test, much to my horror—and despite my earlier lie that I don’t think people who have to twirl the map around are second-class citizens—I scored abysmally on this skill, lower than the average woman’s score and much lower than the average man’s. The concluding report of my test suggested that I was the kind of person who’d have trouble reading maps, especially if I was going in a different direction to that of the plan. How very dare it.
In a 2008 BBC documentary, Born That Way?, actor John Barrowman undertook a variety of quasi-scientific tests to establish whether his being gay was a matter of nature, nurture or a juvenile overdose on show tunes. In one sequence, Barrowman was seen in a car, navigating between appointments, turning the map round in all directions to match the bearings of the route they were taking. ‘Aha!’ seized the psychoanalyst watching the footage. ‘He reads maps just like a woman.’ This was, we were reliably informed, yet another piece of evidence that gay men were hard-wired in a more feminine way than our heterosexual brethren. My boyfriend had to stop me hurling a chair through the television at this point.
I’m sure we weren’t the only gay household erupting in fury at such meaningless analysis. Come to that, I would think that there were a fair few women viewers aiming their own missiles at the screen. Many gay men, and many women of all sexualities and none, are quite brilliant with maps, whether they turn them to suit the direction in which they’re travelling regularly, occasionally or not at all. In fact, from a completely unscientific survey of all the people I’ve ever either been navigated by or discussed maps with, I’d go so far as to say that map addiction is a very common trait amongst many gay men, not perhaps the ones of the John Barrowman stereotype, but the rest of us who, thankfully, make up the vast majority of the gay male spectrum. I’m an occasional user of an online social networking site used predominantly by gay men, and set up a group within it solely to talk about maps. The plug for my group says simply, ‘For those who can read a map like others read Heat or Hello!, and who aren’t ashamed to say so’. There are nearly a hundred members and regular discussions on everything from the favourite features on the London A-Z to the best internet resources for historical mapping. And I don’t think anyone has to turn their computer screen upside down to join in.
The big question behind all of these studies is that old chestnut of nature versus nurture. At risk of sounding like one of those flip sentences you see Carrie Bradshaw elegantly tap into her laptop on Sex and the City:
…is it just self-fulfilling prophecy that women are crap at maps?
Have they been told this so often, and so vehemently, that they’ve disengaged from maps without quite bothering to see if there is any truth in it or not? Fran Loots certainly believes that to be the case. She is the director of Breathing Space Outdoors, a Perthshire-based training organisation that offers numerous courses in outdoor skills. One of the most successful has been her two-day course, unambiguously titled ‘Women CAN Read Maps’. She came up with the idea having reached that thirtysomething stage of life where a good few of her friends were disentangling themselves from dead relationships that they’d been in since their late teenage years. Out and about in the Scottish mountains with these friends, it soon became apparent to Fran that map-reading was an unexpected casualty of these break-ups: the women had become so used to ceding all navigational responsibility to their ex-partners, it had left them scared of a map and its mysteries, and lacking in the confidence to do very much about it. The course was born.
Fran likens map-reading to riding a bike, in that it takes good instruction and regular practice. For the Women CAN Read Maps course, the students gather and their first session has them sharing their stories and phobias around maps. The terror of looking daft underpins so many of these; Fran tells me that this falls away, usually in great gusts of knowing laughter, as each woman confesses her bad map moments—anything from getting confused about symbols to the soul-crushing times when an impatient boyfriend snatched the map out of her hands and muttered that she’d best leave it to him.
Over the two days of the course, Fran takes the women out into woods and hills, encouraging them to use all of their senses and try different vantage points in working out how to position themselves. They learn to judge distances, use compasses and grid references, what the various symbols and different scales of an OS mean and how contours work, all backed up with practical examples on the ground. Symbolically, the course finishes at a fabulous viewpoint where the participants can quite literally see how far they’ve come. And there is no snobbery here about rotating the map to fit the view—it is, as Fran puts it, ‘The simplest way to eliminate any margin of error. After all, you don’t have to read a map as if it’s a book, and it’s a lot easier to move the map than move a mountain.’
The course has been phenomenally successful, and it’s evidently one than Fran herself enjoys hugely. ‘I love the camaraderie and the fact that, in just two short days, you can see what a huge difference it’s made to the participants. It’s been like that every single time; no one has ended the course without having improved their map-reading massively.’ On the surface, this might just be about maps, but—as so often—there are far bigger, meatier issues lurking beneath: rebuilding the sometimes fragile confidence of women trying to overcome an all-too-symbolic block in their minds, a block that was once almost imperceptible, but which has since been built up into the size and shape of a massive brick wall by others. Most importantly, perhaps, demystifying the map also demystifies the landscape, helping re-root people in the countryside and wildernesses that make them sing. It’s strong, yet subtle stuff, a magical alchemy with life-changing effect.
Another Scot, former World Champion rally driver Louise Aitken-Walker, echoes Fran’s points. ‘Women only get lost because they’ve got their husbands screaming at them,’ she says, adding that some of the world’s top male rally drivers choose to have female co-drivers because they are superior navigators. Someone had better tell Allan and Barbara Pease in their cave.
That so many women feel excluded by maps comes as no great surprise, however. Until only very recently, modern cartography has almost always been a resolutely conservative area, reinforcing every assumption that maps are for men, and ladies really shouldn’t bother their pretty little heads about them. Throughout the twentieth century, this can be seen quite dramatically, sometimes hilariously, in the design of the maps, especially the cover images used to catch the eye of a potential punter. American oil company maps, distributed free through the network of service stations, were the mainstay of popular mapping from the 1920s until the ’70s: their covers speak volumes. Interestingly, in the early years of motoring, women shared centre stage with the men: the advent of the motor car meant independence for all, whether brilliantined chaps or their uniformly gorgeous gals. Shell maps of the mid 1930s even showed women at the wheel, firmly in control.
After the Second World War, however, the covers had all changed: a woman was only glimpsed through the window of a car, usually wiping the snotty noses of her offspring or looking vacantly into space, while the husband filled up, posed questions to the attendants, pored over maps and checked oil levels. British maps of the same era had even less of a female presence: as we saw in Chapter 3, of the few Ordnance Surveys that showed people rather than winsome landscapes or overgrown royal crests, the vast majority were men only, whether they were driving, hiking, cycling or just pausing mid-ramble to fill their pipes with a fistful of Ready Rubbed. Ladies were permitted only on tourist maps, most famously on the 1932 OS of the Chilterns, where a modern young couple stride out along a hillside together. It’s a gorgeous fantasy of a picture: a church and a few rustic cottages poke their heads above the lush parapet of greenery, the corn-cloaked hills seem to smile with benign charm. Most fantastical of all, the couple are walking abreast, rather than the more common reality of him marching ahead as he consults the map, while she trots along obediently in his wake, soaking in her usual view of the back of his head.
Lloyd A. Brown’s classic book, The Story of Maps, originally published in 1949, begins with the words: ‘This is the story of maps: the men who made them and the methods they employed.’ He’s only being slightly sexist, for the list of women cartographers is surprisingly skimpy. Although this was obviously a matter of lack of opportunity, rather than lack of ability, it is hard to pinpoint a specifically feminine,
or even feminist, school of map-making, at least until very recent times. Women were often put to work on maps, as embroiderers, engravers, artists, colourists or sewers and stitchers, but this was usually to help their father, husband or brother in his trade, or as lowly employees in the firm. In the eighteenth century, there was a short-lived craze among some gentlewomen for mapping; the finest product from that age came from the eminent French astronomer Nicole-Reine Étable de la Brière Lepaute (1723-88), who, together with two noble lady friends, calculated the precise timings and orbit of the forthcoming 1764 solar eclipse and produced a quite gorgeous map of its trajectory. She also correctly predicted the return of Halley’s Comet in 1759.
War brought women into cartography, just as it brought them into many other traditionally masculine areas of work. During the Second World War, thousands of women were enthusiastically drafted into the mapping divisions of the American military: Millie the Mapper became a lesser-known compatriot of the iconic Rosie the Riveter, whose Rockwell-designed poster, rolling her sleeves up to the slogan ‘We Can Do It!’, inspired millions of women into war-work. In Britain, where the need was just as acute, the response was no less hearty, although orchestrated in a rather more mealy-mouthed way by the authorities. Many new women geographers and cartographers were drafted into the Ordnance Survey and the Hydrographic Office of the Admiralty, but only as an emergency—and temporary—measure. The OS, in particular, found the adjustment a little hard to take; an internal memorandum states baldly that ‘it would be desirable that the whole recruitment should not be from women’. Neither were they paid anything like their male colleagues, as an instruction from the Treasury made starchily clear:
…the sort of work which you expect from these women draughtsmen (who it seems to us hardly merit the title in the full sense) appears to be on rather a lower scale than that of the Office of Works employees; in fact we are inclined to think that the suggested title [Mapping Assistant] should be changed to that of Learner Tracers (below age 18) and Tracers (from age 18 and after completion of the probationary period).
Ironically, by the outbreak of the Second World War, the most famous product of a female cartographer in British history had already been published: the London A-Z. The story of its creator, Phyllis Pearsall (1906-96), is one of map-making’s most celebrated, and with good cause: it’s a blockbuster movie-in-waiting, albeit with a wildly embellished script. Ever tuned to its marketing potential, Phyllis spun her own tale for all that she could, and others have pitched in subsequently to enrich it with even more lavish quantities of sugar and spice. The popular version, repeated ad nauseam through the press, across the internet and forming the basis of Sarah Hartley’s saccharine biography, Mrs P’s Journey, is that Phyllis came up with the idea for the London A-Z one night in 1935, after getting lost and soaked in a downpour on the way to a party. The very next day, she sprang out of bed at 5.00 a.m., and set to walking and cataloguing every one of the 23,000 streets of the capital, a task that took the best part of the year, with Phyllis tramping the streets each day from five in the morning until nigh on midnight. The only other maps available were hideously out-of-date large-scale Ordnance Surveys that hadn’t been updated since the First World War. Single-handedly, Phyllis found a draughtsman, and between the two of them, they researched, drew, wrote, indexed and had printed the first copies of the A-Z, which Phyllis then took around all of the booksellers, most of whom dismissed her without a second glance. After a week of trying to be seen by the chief buyer for W. H. Smith, he finally took her into his office and ordered a raft of her maps, which were an instant best-seller. To cope with the demand, the tiny Phyllis had to cart copies all over London in a borrowed wheelbarrow. It’s a lovely story, but it doesn’t entirely coincide with the truth.
That Phyllis Pearsall was an indomitable woman is not in question. Indeed, she was possibly even more spirited and determined than the overly winsome account of the A-Z would have us believe. Phyllis (née Gross) was the daughter of two theatrically extravagant characters, her Hungarian-Jewish father, Alexander Gross (formerly ‘Grosz’), and her Irish-Italian-English mother, Bella Crowley, a suffragette playwright. You’d struggle to find two more insufferably selfish, highly strung people: Phyllis’s childhood was a minefield of constant relocation, divorce, abandonment and abuse, all caked in wildly fluctuating wealth. The money came from her father’s Geographia Map Company, which had done spectacularly well out of the First World War, by providing millions of much-sought-after war maps to the general public through the newspapers. Despite that, the company, and her father, went bankrupt in 1920, he being ousted by an internal putsch orchestrated by his estranged wife’s brother, Frank Crowley. Geographia passed into new hands, and Alexander Gross limped over to New York, where he set up another map-making business with the same name. In Alexander’s absence (and to his inevitable fury, though he soon came on board), Frank Crowley wormed his way into Phyllis’s affections and got her to join him in his own map-selling concerns. To Phyllis, this was a way of both rehabilitating her father’s reputation in London and making some money to support her career as an artist. The two of them, together with a small team of draughtsmen and printers, produced extravagant wall maps of the world, and then one of England and Wales. In her autobiography, From Bedsitter to Household Name, Phyllis states that the idea of a London street atlas came from her draughtsman, Mr Fountain, in conjunction with her father, still busily controlling events, even from New York. There is no mention of a wet dinner party. Neither was the idea launched in the complete vacuum that the romantics would have us believe: there already existed a slew of London street maps and atlases, published by, among others, Bacon, Philip’s, Bartholomew and her father’s old company, Geographia. Phyllis’s unique contributions to the genre were to be comprehensive, including every last mews and alley for the very first time, to be bang up to date, to include information such as bus routes and selected house numbers along main roads, and to produce it as a cheap, cheerful, portable option, for most of the rivals were ostentatiously classy and far too large to be popped into a coat pocket or handbag.
None of this is to decry or denigrate the achievements of the amazing Mrs Pearsall. Her gritty determination to honour her family and power her way through almost insurmountable problems is a major inspiration. The company that she founded, Geographers’, which changed its name to the Geographers’ A-Z Map Company in 1972 in recognition of the universal knowledge of the A-Z brand, has been a pillar of steadiness and good practice in the often cut-throat world of map publishing. This was entirely thanks to Phyllis herself, particularly her decision in 1966 to put all her shares in the company into a trust that would secure the set-up from potential hostile bids, takeovers or mergers in the event of her death. As it was, she lived for a further thirty years, dying just a month before her ninetieth birthday, and still working as the managing director and chairman of the company. Staff of Geographers’ A-Z are notoriously loyal, long-serving and very well looked after: ‘A family business indeed,’ are the concluding words of her eccentric autobiography, ‘but the family not by inheritance, but by worth. May God bless the ship and all who sail in her!’ Hers was a decidedly feminine way of running a map-making business, but spare us the extraneous fluff and schmaltz that has clung to her reputation ever since.
The A-Z is the Cinderella of British mapping, a fact that infuriated Phyllis Pearsall throughout her long life. It’s hard to see quite why. Perhaps it is down to the unorthodox origins of the company. Perhaps it is thanks to the indomitable, sometimes bizarre, characters of both Phyllis and her father, neither of whom were ever granted access to the British establishment, in cartography or anything else (although the Royal Geographic Society, from which Alexander had been expelled on his first bankruptcy, finally recognised the family’s achievements with an exhibition in 1986 to mark Geographers’ half-century). Perhaps it is because the A-Z is such a functional map, one to stuff in your back pocket rather than be taken out and admired in company or mounted beautifully on a wall. Despite its ubiquity in the corner shops and bedsits of London, the A-Z and Phyllis Pearsall barely ever scrape a mention in academic studies of urban British mapping.
While cartographic snobbery—not a force to be underestimated—undoubtedly plays a part in this, there is something curiously lowly about the A-Z, especially before it became full colour in the 1990s. Looking at my 1985 copy now, the one I bought on arriving in London for university, the cover has long since detached itself, its monochrome pages have yellowed, a few have fallen out, the corners have turned up, coffee-cup stains pepper the indigestibly packed streets of Archway and Bethnal Green, ancient biro notes, arrows, rendezvous and phone numbers are scribbled throughout like arcane graffiti. I’d sooner mark my own skin than deface an Ordnance Survey map, but the cheap paper and graceless bulk of the A-Z seem almost to demand it. It is, to be honest, a bit of a mess: not just the jumbled remnants of my student social life, but the maps themselves. Too busy, too packed, too difficult to read; at eighteen, I loved the chaos of it and hurtled around the city streets like a pinball. At forty-two, it overwhelms me, hurts my eyes and makes me want a lie-down. Of course, I could get the supersized version of the A-Z, but that removes the point of having it in the first place, namely its portability and concision. These days, when I go to London, I use a rival street atlas (the AA’s) that is far calmer on the eyes and soul. This it achieves by not packing in half as much detail as the A-Z: I’d be lost trying to find, for instance, the neighbouring Canning Town streets, so comprehensively labelled by the A-Z as Woodstock St, Sabbarton St, Willan Wall and Nelson St, for these appear in the AA atlas as W S, S S, Wl W and Nl St respectively. Many streets are indexed and then given an asterisk to indicate that, ‘due to scale restrictions’, they’re not named on the maps at all. No such infuriating selectivity in the A-Z, which manages to squeeze absolutely everything into a book considerably smaller, and about half the weight, of the AA equivalent.
Is there anything identifiably feminine about the cartography of the A-Z? Hard to say, especially when you consider its long association with that most blokeish of groups, London’s black-cab drivers. If there is, it’s in the more nebulous qualities of the atlases, their sheer democracy and classlessness, their refusal to pander to the snobbery and pomposity of the mapping grandees. To that end, the inclusion, for the first time, of bus information and house numbers on long main roads, to stop people getting off the bus at number 40 and finding it’s still a mile walk to number 512, could be said to be a female touch, the triumph of common-or-garden practicality over the fancy flourishes for the cognoscenti that were the mainstay of earlier mapping.
There are some maps that could only have been designed and executed by women; the finest example I’ve ever encountered presented itself at the end of a month-long holiday in Thailand a couple of years ago. On our return to Bangkok, we gladly ditched the Lonely Planet, which had only taken us to bars and restaurants full of other people frantically combing the same guide. I’d heard of the Nancy Chandler map of the city, which sounded intriguing, and sought one out. Nancy came to Bangkok in 1969, a freewheeling San Fran hippy chick and artist. In the 1970s, she drew and published her first map of the city, to immediate success. Over thirty years later, it’s still going strong and has bred numerous imitators, though none with the panache of the original.
Nancy’s map is phenomenal. It was a whole new way of looking at the city, any city, and it bears all the hallmarks of being dreamed up and drawn by women. Most shockingly to a male map addict, there are
seven different maps spread over both sides of a near A1 sheet, and none of them has a scale. In terms of area of coverage, the maps range from a plan of Greater Bangkok to a close-up of the Chatuchak weekend market, and you swiftly work out the relative scale of them automatically. Instead of trying to plot your way according to how far in miles or metres one thing is to the next, scale is wholly secondary to landmarks (from major temples to minor cafés) and the relative distance between them. Fantastic, oddball, sometimes funny textual hints and notes plaster the plan, many utterly intriguing and none of them superfluous. Until 2008, all of this was handwritten by Nancy, although it’s now done in a computer font that keeps that casual feel. Unusual recommendations, for food, shops and sights, come thick and fast. It works—really works—on an intuitive level, which, in a city as vast and dizzying as Bangkok, is way more useful than any plod-along scale map. I have to admit that my first reaction to it was shock; like the city itself, it is colourful and chaotic, a riot of pink, purple, blue, yellow and green. My partner took to it immediately. When we visit a new city, I’ll be struggling with the map, searching for street names in a strange tongue, even a strange alphabet, and getting hopelessly lost, while he quietly plots his way around instinctively and spatially. He has all the natural sense of direction that I lack and it’s always him that will find our way back to the car or the station, not me, the soi-disant travel writer.
Enthralled by this map that turned pretty much every cartographic convention on its head, yet worked so brilliantly, I contacted Nancy and her daughter, Nima, who now runs the company. Nancy stressed that she had no cartographic training, and that she’d approached the maps more as an artist. But, like Phyllis Pearsall, forty years and six thousand miles away, the main way to plot the city was to walk it, and this she did, as even the maps held in the Bangkok City Map Department were less than wholly accurate. How had the map changed over the three decades? Nima: ‘When I started working with my mother on the map, we introduced an index, not only so I could figure out what was on the map (there was, and still is, so very much on it), but also to enable those using it to more easily find what they might be interested in. Of course, I wanted grid lines introduced, but Nancy The Artist insisted they would ruin the artistic appeal of the map, so we compromised by using fold lines as grids. That does make it harder to find things as a single grid may cover a lot of territory, but as Nancy says, “Maybe while looking for one thing, a person will discover something else nearby of interest.” It’s true. And very much like what happens when exploring cities like Bangkok and Chiang Mai. You can be wandering down a side street, using it as a short cut to somewhere else, when you come across an amazing little antique shop or a quiet peaceful Chinese temple that draws you in.’
I had a hunch that their maps (they also do one of Thailand’s second city, Chiang Mai) would appeal to women more than men, and wondered if their sales showed this. ‘Yes,’ Nima replied. She said that their international distributor once told her that 80 per cent of maps are bought by men, but that 80 per cent of their early customers were women and that, today, their website sales indicate that the figure’s still at least 60 per cent. She continued: ‘We believe the reason we attract more interest from women is because of the way women think in terms of landmarks and points of interest. Women do have a different way of looking at a city, which is much more landmark oriented than street straight, so to speak. Most men want driving maps (perhaps because they are so hesitant to ask for directions). Men prefer maps with everything perfectly to scale, in colours they are accustomed to, and with only the details they are interested in. Women, however, in our belief, are interested in everything out there, from the little ladies who do “invisible mending” on the sidewalk to where they can take the kids for a fun day out to great little boutiques, cafés and such. There are those who are at first taken aback by the colourful, initially chaotic nature of our maps. Given ten or twenty minutes with one of them, however, and you can see their faces light up as they figure out how it works. Time and time again, especially with men who prefer more plain-colour, street-oriented maps, I’ve seen them become “true believers”!’
The Chandlers can count me among their true believers. Their map made the massive, sprawling, confusing and occasionally scary city of Bangkok manageable, friendly even. It demystified the chaos, whereas the angular blocks of text, interminable listings and chilly maps of the Lonely Planet only exacerbated it. I wasn’t in the slightest bit surprised when Nima told me: ‘To our amazement, we get five to ten emails or letters a week thanking us for the maps. Who ever would have thought of writing a thank-you letter to a map-maker?’ Women, that’s who. And very polite gay men.
The image of Nancy Chandler or Phyllis Pearsall pounding the chaotic streets of their respective cities is fabulously inspiring. Although Phyllis’s tale has taken on the air of a game of Chinese Whispers, where the eventual story is miles from the original, her early days of mapping London came at a crucial point in her life. She’d just walked out—literally, left him fast asleep in Venice—on her husband of eight years, and she was still only twenty-nine. All her life, she’d been on the move, and was unable, or unwilling, to stop. Walking attentively through the streets of London was perpetual motion for sure, but on a very different scale. Used to big, full-screen images glimpsed at speed, Phyllis was now observing all the minutiae of life in one of the world’s truly great cities. She would have seen dockers at dawn, City gents in the rush hour, ladies lunching, kids hurtling through school gates, the drunkards and detritus of the night, obscene poverty and wealth alike, all flashing past as she briskly strode through. The discipline and rhythm of hitting the city streets at five o’clock in the morning and walking, walking, walking well beyond nightfall, seeing the daily billow and sag of a vast metropolis, gave the task a near-spiritual hue. The job was an extended linear meditation.
These days, city walking is a big literary business. I suspect that Phyllis Pearsall, armed with her notebooks, pencils and unwavering discipline to getting a very specific job done, would be bemused to find that her paths have been followed by so many ‘gentleman strollers of the city streets’ (Baudelaire), the idle flâneurs who publish their verbal, sometimes verbose, maps and are hailed as geniuses of psychogeography. Of course, we have learned much from some of the great exponents of the art, especially in London from the likes of Peter Ackroyd, Iain Sinclair, Will Self and Nick Papadimitriou. At its best, their work riffs off far earlier visionary and occult writing, born in an age when London was ballooning in size and status, casually, sometimes cruelly, dominating the nation, an empire and the world. To walk the city, even from the cosy surrounds of the fireside, in the company of Ackroyd or Sinclair is to revel in the connections made, the eye for the rusty and rotting, the sometimes haughty disregard for the overhyped landmarks, the comprehensive sweep that fuses politics, history and topography through observation and trenchant supposition. The role of the stroller is crucial to all of this, not only because walking is the perfect method of inquisitive locomotion, but also as a way of reclaiming urban spaces, from where the pedestrian was so brutally edged out and marginalised in the immediate post-war years.
Nowhere is it decreed (for it doesn’t need to be), but psychogeography is a something of a boy’s sport—or, rather more accurately, a middle-aged man’s. There he goes, bustling by in a cloud of Ralgex and stewed tea, armed with a map or two, a bus pass, a waterproof, a camera, a notebook and a rekindled sense of adventure last felt when playing Cowboys and Indians. He knows that, ultimately, his work is ephemeral and unlikely to save or change lives, but still, beneath the jowly surface and air of gruffness, there’s the unmistakable strut of a man on a mission. He layers his investigations with fancy names—deep mapping, deep topography, the dérive—as a smokescreen for their inherent ordinariness, for what could be more common sense than a good walk and an enthusiasm for local history, gilded by the chance to be highly opinionated about it?
Is there much difference between the psychogeographer and the stalwart of the local history society? They’d both like to think so: the literary flâneur has no time for the persnickety obsessions of those who worry like terriers over the puny bones of their half-dozen streets, while the local historians, as Will Self put it, ‘view us as insufferably bogus and travelling—if anywhere at all—right up ourselves’. From an outsider’s perspective, however, there are very many cross-overs, not least in the fact that both groups largely comprise men of a certain age. Men of my age, I realise, with a faint shudder.
Either way, psychogeographic wanderings and becoming chairman of the Hither Green History Society are mutually dependable occupations, both terribly male and terribly British (yes, I know the French have an illustrious track record in psychogeography, not least having defined it in the first place, and the Americans are getting quite obsessed by it these days, but there is a peculiarly British strain to it that occupies me the most). And both love, collect and spend many long hours with their maps. The greatest difference is humour: a deep map of anywhere needs irony, poetry and a sharp sense of both the ridiculous and the sublime, not qualities generally found among the serried ranks of bank managers in the average local history society. If that sounds harsh, I say it with some considerable, and rather bitter, experience. Having written and presented dozens of ‘sense of place’ television programmes in all corners of Wales, I soon learned that it wasn’t often the best idea to interview in any given location the retired gentleman who’d written the exhaustive book about the village or town we were in, for, whatever the question, he could only regurgitate vast chunks of his bone-dry text, which made for tricky editing and stodgy viewing.
Worse, occasional appearance on the box has meant that I’ve been buttonholed too many times by men who want to talk to me—no, talk at me—for hours about their unbounded enthusiasm for steam trains, steam engines, vintage cars, telegraph poles, village water pumps, milestones, road signs, army bases or phone boxes. One recent experience nearly tipped me over the edge. I was staying the night in a border town, during its annual festival. I’d clocked a poster for a comedy gig, featuring an old mate of mine from my stand-up days of a decade earlier, and thought it would be good to catch up with him again. It was. The gig was great fun, it was a joy to see him and we caught up over a couple of pints in the bar afterwards. He was with the other performers, and, before long, a bevy of young beauties had latched on to us, giggling and fluttering at every utterance from the comedians they’d just been applauding, even according the same flattery to me by dint of association. I’d forgotten that flirty, ego-stiffening aspect to the stand-up gig, surely one of the main reasons so many young men go in for it in the first place.
Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a man, aged about sixty and dressed entirely in varying shades of beige, bearing down on me. ‘You’re the telly bloke, aren’t you, does them programmes about local history?’ ‘Er, sort of,’ I demurred. He ploughed on regardless. ‘You know much about the old mines? I’ve been down every old mine shaft in this county. There’s waterwheels and everything down there. Where were you last week on your programme? Ceredigion? You been to the lead mines in Cwmystwyth?’ And on. And on. As it was quite noisy, he leant into me and blasted me with a deadly cocktail of tedium and halitosis about all the old mineshafts he’d ever explored. There was absolutely no escape; he was practically pinning me to the bar. I looked up to see my comedian mate give me a thumbs up and a wink as he prepared to leave with his gaggle of groupies, and watched as my carefree old life trilled and tittered its way out of the door, before wrenching myself back to my new life, which was still delivering a monologue about the joys of old mine shafts some six inches from my face. Perhaps he’s fallen down one by now; you can but hope.
One of the most inventive of psychogeographers is anarchic polymath Bill Drummond. It is, seemingly, the law of the land to follow up any mention of him with the description ‘the man who burned a million quid’, referring to that famously cupid stunt that saw him and Jimmy Cauty incinerate a large chunk of the money that had been culled from their short, but glorious, career as the KLF. Drummond’s speciality is drawing shapes or words on maps, and then walking them. As manager of Echo and the Bunnymen, he sent the band off on a tour of remote outposts, such as the Outer Hebrides and Iceland. ‘It’s not random,’ he explained. ‘If you look at a map of the world, the whole tour’s in the shape of a rabbit’s ears.’ He employed the same idea for the 1984 Bunnymen-themed day of activity in Liverpool that Channel 4 filmed for a special of The Tube. Hundreds of Bunnymen fans were packed off on a bike ride, again following the shape of a rabbit that Drummond had drawn on a city map. A manhole cover at the bottom of Mathew Street, home of the Cavern Club, served as the rabbit’s navel, the omphalos of the city’s grandiloquent rock ‘n’ roll mythmaking. Best, and blokiest, of all have been his cartographic equivalents of pissing in the snow: writing his name, BILL, in big letters across various maps and then walking them out on the ground. The rock-star ego collides with the quiet conjuring of the urban witch. I haven’t yet tried it with MIKE, but I know that one day I will.
It’s something of a relief to find that there is a cross-over, however apparently slight, between map addiction and the scuzzy excesses of rock ‘n’ roll. Maps may well be imbued with the spirit of ‘Enid Blyton, Radio 4 and the National Trust’, as the Product Manager from the Ordnance Survey had so elegantly put it, but they can tickle our primal urges too if we let them. There are many punks, rockers and rappers whose art is imbued with a map sensibility; who have employed real and fictional maps as cover imagery, talked about them directly in their lyrics and titles, or used them to demonstrate a profound sense of place. Mirroring my terror that map adoration means a swift descent into bombast and bigotry goes the worry that, in music-meets-maps terms, the ground would largely be occupied by prog-rock dinosaurs who fried their tiny minds over King Arthur and Stonehenge in the 1970s, leaving only enough brain cells to become celebrity spokesmen for UKIP. You just know that their home studio walls are adorned with a few first-edition antique maps, probably with the exorbitant price tag still prominently attached. Thankfully, they’re far from the only ones on the hallowed turf. If those grizzly old Spinal Tappers are the ten-thousand-quid showboat maps, then legends like Bill Drummond, his archnemesis Julian Cope, Andy Partridge, Nick Drake and Robert Plant are battered, much-used Ordnance Surveys, Neil Hannon of The Divine Comedy, Damon Albarn and Luke Haines (particularly in his Black Box Recorder days) are leather-bound road atlases with a golden silk bookmark, while Ray Davies, Morrissey, Mike Skinner of The Streets and Jarvis Cocker are A-Zs of London, Manchester (De-Luxe Edition), Birmingham and Sheffield respectively.
Anarchy meets pedantry in music, in maps and in any other pursuit that gets gentlemen a little sweaty and excited. It’s all part of our faintly autistic desire to structure the world around us so that it fits, to collect, order, categorise and alphabetise (or, in the case of maps, numerate) our chosen obsessions. This is why the happiest men are those that can make their living out of their favourite hobbies, for that gives them carte blanche to be as picky and persnickety as they like: it’s all research, it’s all useful, it’s all tax deductable and it’s all good for business. At least, that’s what they tell their wives and partners as they vanish into some obscure corner of cyberspace to nail down a rarity or plunge into a three-hour geekfest discussion. Women, I think, appreciate maps just as much as men. Many are just as good at reading them as we are. They see them as a practical, useful tool with only an occasional patina of aesthetic or emotional appeal. We love them like our brothers; rather more, in fact. Vive la différence.