A recent sign demanding that you ignore your satnav. My sentiments entirely
9. PRATNAV
So beware paeans to the paper map, a threatened species in the age of the Global Positioning System (GPS), satnav and digitisation. Plenty of others, almost invariably middle-aged men, have written such paeans, published at regular intervals since Chris Parker, the Ordnance Survey’s head of research and development, announced at a Royal Geographical Society conference last August that printed maps now account for only 9% of its business.
˜ Stephen Moss, Guardian (March 2007)
A damp, dreary day in Merthyr Tydfil. There aren’t many other kinds of day in Merthyr, especially in October. I’m sat in my camper van in the world’s most unprepossessing lay-by, just off a busy, noisy junction of the A470. It’s not the sort of lay-by that inspires cracking open a beer and a pork pie as you soak in the view; it rather more suggests killing someone, quite possibly yourself. As ever, I’m waiting for the walkie-talkie to burst into life—We’re ready!—to tell me that the camera crew are in position to film me lumbering past, just one more drive-by shot in the 500-piece jigsaw of shots that we must finish in three short days to produce another episode of my round-Wales-with-my-dog-in-a-camper-van TV series. I’d wanted to call the series Camper Cymru (pun fully intended). That was disallowed, not because of the weak double entendre, but because the word Cymru might put viewers off, make them think that the series was in the Welsh language, despite being on ITV, just after Emmerdale. So I’ve been saddled with Great Welsh Roads as a title. This is not one of them.
The minutes drag by. The walkie-talkie remains stubbornly silent. Surely to God, they haven’t got lost again? It’s something of a hindrance trying to film travelogues with colleagues who, for all their many fabulous and redeeming qualities, have neither any sense of direction nor ability to read a map. Every time I wave them off to set up somewhere for a shot of me trundling towards or away from them, I get a sinking feeling in my guts that I might not see them again for hours. Usually, they get most spectacularly lost just at the point where the walkie-talkie range has vanished, along with the signal on everybody’s mobiles. At least—and this is pretty much the sole advantage of being on the outskirts of Merthyr—there’s a steady five bars on my phone.
A flash sports car pulls up alongside. From within, a man and a woman stare at me with a slightly scary ferocity. What do they want? Is it a drive-by shooting? Aggressively proactive dogging? They signal me to wind my window down, which I do, reluctantly. The dog starts to growl behind me.
‘’Ere, mate,’ says the man, in pure Estuary, as he cranes over the woman in the passenger seat. ‘Which bit o’ Cardiff is this?’
‘It’s not Cardiff,’ I reply. ‘It’s Merthyr. Merthyr Tydfil.’
‘Nah, mate, it’s Cardiff. Satnav says so. Which way’s the centre?’
‘Honest, it’s not Cardiff. This is Merthyr. Cardiff’s twenty-five miles down the road. That way.’ I point vaguely and, I hope, helpfully.
‘That’s bollocks!’ he explodes. She nods. ‘It’s all the same down ‘ere anyway, innit? This is Cardiff, innit? Satnav says so.’
‘Well ask your bloody satnav then.’ I gracelessly wind the window back up and realise that they are now glaring very hard. Oh shit. I really don’t fancy being the first statistic of Satnav Rage.
The walkie-talkie erupts into life—OK Mike, we’re ready for you. Thank God for that. I kangaroo hop out of the lay-by and leave them in a cloud of blue diesel smoke.
I despise satnavs. I tried hard not to, because I didn’t want to mark myself out quite so obviously as a crusty old Luddite, but my God, they really are a loathsome invention. When I go in friends’ cars, and they reach to turn on the satnav, it takes every shred of self-control not to rip the thing out of their hands and beat them to a bloody pulp with a road atlas. When these devices first appeared on the scene, I started with a fairly open mind, intrigued by the idea of a moving map on your dashboard and all of the possibilities that could entail. A neighbour, always keen on the latest gadget, had invested in one and proudly showed it off to me one evening. We walked it around the village, and the little screen kept changing, an arrow flashing on our exact position. I was quietly impressed, and even thinking of getting one.
Then I saw them in action, and the admiration quickly turned to loathing. As an experiment, I borrowed my neighbour’s device one day when I had to go and meet someone about forty miles away, on the other side of Montgomeryshire. I left the map at home, and entrusted myself instead to the monotone instructions. Of course, I had a vague idea in my head as to which route I’d take, but before long Sally, the satnav voice, had veered from that and ordered me down a side road. OK, I thought, this is an alternative route; could be interesting. Suspend all critical thinking—a seemingly automatic process for satnav users—and let Sally do the work. We burrowed further into highhedged country lanes, through villages I’d never heard of and in what I felt sure was the wrong direction. Sally smoothly assured me otherwise, and, more fool me, I believed her. We reached a bridge over a tiny stream, and she let out a contented sigh: ‘You have arrived at your destination.’ ‘No, I bloody haven’t!’ I shouted back at her. ‘We’re in the middle of sodding nowhere!’ Sally, not used to being talked to like that, gave me the silent treatment.
Because I’d been idiot enough not to bring the map with me, I had absolutely no clue as to where she’d dumped me. Remembering a farmhouse about half a mile back down the lane, I executed an awkward seven-point turn and headed there. It felt like the beginning of a particularly poor horror movie to knock on a remote farm door and blurt out: ‘Sorry, but could you tell me where I am?’ as the opening gambit. Luckily, the farmer thought it was hilarious and soon put me on the right road (not, incidentally, the one grumpy Sally was taking me down). I was a full six miles from where I was supposed to be, and arrived for my rendezvous very late and fuming. Back in my village, the satnav’s owner shook his head in wonder when I returned it and told him the story. ‘Never given me any trouble,’ he said. One wet night a few months later, Sally told him to turn right somewhere near Warrington. He obeyed and then found himself going south on the northbound carriageway of a—thankfully fairly quiet—motorway. Swiftly realising the mistake, he tugged the car on to the hard shoulder and sat there panting for a few heart-stopping moments, the headlights of the oncoming cars screaming past just inches away. Dazzled and dazed, he didn’t notice the coloured flashing lights that were also bearing down on him at speed, and suddenly found a police vehicle had pulled up behind him. He got an enormous bollocking, a fine, three points and a whole load of new grey hairs. And he’s still seeing her.
Over the next couple of years, my hatred of satnavs congealed like sour milk. With only one exception that I can remember, every time I’ve been in a vehicle under their control, something has gone wrong. And every day seemed to bring yet another of those stories about ambulances going hundreds of miles out of their way, or lorries getting wedged in farm tracks, stuck under bridges or teetering on cliff edges, all thanks to the blind adherence of drivers to an electronic brain, instead of giving their own a bit of a polish. Obviously, I giggled like a schoolgirl at every one of these stories, none more so than the one, in March 2007, of the posh bird who drove her £96,000 Mercedes into a swollen Leicestershire river, because ‘Satnav said so’. She was rescued in the nick of time, and driven by a villager to a nearby motorway service station, where a chauffer-driven Bentley arrived to speed her on her way. The Merc sat in the river for a week, before being towed out and written off. The reason that this story, above the countless others, is worthy of being carved in stone is simple. It is the most poetic satnav mishap yet, for the river was called the Sense, and the village Sheepy Magna. I’m guessing that that’s Latin for ‘big, dull sheep that follows without questioning’.
Satnavs are one more gadget to disempower us, to turn us into mindless jelly brains that cannot take any responsibility for ourselves, and don’t see why we should have to. It’s one more nagging computerised voice humming like a hornet in our ears, one more screen in lives that are already dominated by them at home, at work, in the pub, in the street, by the bed, in shops and stations, on buses and trains, for business, for leisure and for love. And if they seem prone to nagging on the occasional car journey, I can’t imagine how anyone who drives for a living copes with them. All too often, it’s even worse, for the nag in the cab is also having a good snoop; tracking technology is used on most professional drivers these days, as they hurtle around trying to keep to an impossible timetable. Every satnav-accompanied journey I’ve been on has massively underestimated the time it takes to get anywhere. Have twenty even slight underestimations in one day, and they’ll seriously start to grate. Perhaps the only way to keep to their unrealistic timetable is to drive like a maniac, tailgate everyone in front of you and do some spectacularly dangerous overtaking. For there always seems to be the latest, top-of-the-range satnav on the dashboard of anyone I ever see driving like that.
And what are they doing to our spatial awareness and sense of geography? A satnav only ever shows you the next short stretch of road; plenty of people admit that they’ve no idea of where their journey has actually taken them—if you asked them to show you on the map, they’d shrug and look away. Bridgewater could be next to Bradford, King’s Lynn a suburb of Liverpool, for all they know. And, worse, for all they care. In fairness, the country that satnavs steer them through isn’t really worth knowing anyway, for it’s just the next mile of roads and junctions, traffic lights, speed cameras, petrol stations and contraflow systems that make an appearance: the nation boiled down to its least uplifting features. Not that satnavs can entirely be blamed for that, for they are merely the latest in a long continuum of maps that denude our geography of its blips and bumps, its warts of history and character. This is a process that has been going on apace ever since road atlases made their first appearance, and has accelerated through the last fifty years of obsession with motorways as the only way to travel. The satnav and the motorway are perfect companions, promoting driving not travelling, anger and frustration instead of wonder and excitement. It’s no coincidence that the first midwives of the motorway were Hitler and Mussolini.
In 2008, the British Cartographic Society (BCS) launched a surprise counter-attack with their pronouncement that the relentless march of online maps and satnavs was rendering historical landmarks invisible: features such as churches, ancient woodlands and old buildings that help us understand a landscape. The then BCS president, Mary Spence, found herself whisked between various TV studios to make her case, which also contained dark warnings that the teaching of map-reading was disappearing from schools, and that ‘the consequence will be longterm damage to future generations of map-readers’.
She continued, saying how ‘corporate cartographers are demolishing thousands of years of history—not to mention Britain’s remarkable geography—at a stroke, by not including them on maps’, particularly singling out the ubiquitous Google maps for criticism. Using Tewkesbury in Gloucestershire as an example, she compared the Ordnance Survey’s portrait of the town with Google’s version. On the OS 1:50 000, features include the lovely Norman abbey, the site of a 1471 battle, a prehistoric mound called Margaret’s Camp, two museums, the River Swilgate, a tourist office, various churches, the hospital, the council offices, a weir, some mills and marinas, an assortment of footpaths, a school, the cemetery, a disused railway, a golf course, two campsites and a picnic area. If you print off the Google map, even at the highest resolution, the only feature marked aside from road names is the Tewkesbury Park Hotel Golf and Country Club. ‘There is just a hole where the abbey is,’ said Ms Spence. ‘This is tragic. They call this a map but it is so inadequate. It has not been interpreted in any way. It has no landmarks on it.’ The previous morning, she said, she had walked to the Royal Geographical Society in Kensington along Exhibition Road, home to the Natural History Museum, the Science Museum and the V&A; none were shown on the Google map of the area.
She was supported as a prophet and pilloried as a throwback in almost equal measure. The BBC ran one of their online ‘Have Your Say’ debates in response to the BCS complaints, and it was as full of illumination and wisdom as ever. I have to confess to a slight addiction to ‘Have Your Say’ (HYS to the cognoscenti); not as a contributor, but as a wide-eyed reader of the venom and warped logic that it so magnificently showcases every day. Of course, this is the same for any internet forum, each one a watering hole for all the braggarts, bullies and bullshitters of our world to parade their flimsy knowledge of any given topic, but the BBC version seems to be a magnet for some of the finest of the breed. When I’m working at home and the pace flags or ennui descends, ten minutes in the wacky world of HYS almost always does the trick in restoring my bounce. And the ‘maps versus satnav’ debate was every bit as hilarious as I could have hoped.
There are often thousands of contributions, so the best way to see where the wind is blowing is by ordering them according to which ones have received the greatest number of Readers’ Recommendations. Of the top five most recommended, two ploughed a muchgrooved HYS furrow:
How long will it be before the location of every Mosque in England is included on maps? boomed a regular klaxon of the boards, always able to twist any debate into a fulsome rant against Islam. This was the second most recommended contribution from among the thousands. Another poster (nom de plume ‘angry man’, in case you were in any doubt) disappeared up the same mental cul-de-sac with a contribution that attracted hundreds of recommendations: Has anyone ever produced a map with ‘old building’ being depicted? Buildings are like ladies (an endangered species in this day and age). So one should not speak openly of their age, simply muse and wonder. This is like saying philatelist’s [sic] weep every time I post a letter of complaint about the taste of the glue on stamps these days. It may have escaped the British Cartographic Society attention but there appears to be Holy war on the go. So it maybe just prudent not to list Churches on maps.
It’s not just the Islamaphobes spewing their spleen on to their keyboards; on absolutely any given topic, there’s a queue of myopic malcontents determined to yoke their particular obsession to the debate. That catch-all Political Correctness Gone Mad! is always a dependable one:
I’d be more concerned about Political Correctness destroying our history and culture than a certain type of map. Plus the appalingly [sic] bad quality of TV programming that fills peoples [more sic] heads. Thank you, Mr D of Woking, and the couple of dozen people who voted for the sagacity of your contribution. Worryingly, even more thought this dribbling hooey worthy of a thumbs up: The people wiping out history of PC idealists who decide that teaching kids about British chrisitan [sic] history may offend minority religious groups, or British military history will offend foreigners, or things like the industrial revolution will offend socialists and marxists.
Even among those who managed to remember what the topic in hand actually was, one of the most popular declarations came from ‘a serving Rayal [sic] Navy officer’: Sat navs are for people who are being dumbed down by the chav culture. Attracting far fewer votes but voicing rather greater wisdom, Jonathan Fox of Manchester: I don’t see what the problem is? I can download points of interest to my Sat Nav. I can view the location I am interested in from any perspective and in 3 dimensions. I can get additional data of a location with the use of wikipedia markers on the map and there are often accompanying photos. This is far superior to maps of old. OS and the British Cartographic Society restricted the use of their maps by the use of copyright. They should innovate instead of complaining. Tough Luck!
Good points all by Mr Fox, but entirely dependent on that old maxim—the downfall of many of us—that any piece of technology is only as good as the idiot operating it. Mary Spence’s warning was about the disappearance of fundamental data from the base line of our most generally used cartography. Yes, you could overlay your satnav or your online map with the most phenomenal level of detail, be it fifteenthcentury, and only fifteenth-century, churches, stone circles or Conservative Clubs. But only if you knew how, had sourced the information online and actively bothered to call the information up. The chance encounter with something remarkable is the casualty of such bespoke choice, and that is to lose one of a map’s greatest qualities.
Mary Spence’s comparison of the difference in detail between the OS and Google maps of Tewkesbury highlights this point to perfection, although you’ll find much the same yawning gap anywhere. Ed Parsons, geospatial technologist at Google, retorts: ‘These traditional landmarks are still on the map but people need to search for them. Interactive maps will display precisely the information people want, when they want it. You couldn’t possibly have everything already pinpointed.’ But you will, of course, have the Tewkesbury Park Hotel Golf and Country Club flagged large, whether you called it up or not. That’s what makes me feel quite queasy about this new generation of mapping; its relentless tilt towards what Mary Spence calls ‘corporate blankwash’, the emphasis of the bland and businesslike over anything else.
We can be too shrill about this, for sure. There are millions of people who never look at maps other than the ones on their mobile, computer screen or satnav, but then they wouldn’t have been poring over Ordnance Surveys twenty years ago either. They’d have been using a three-quid road atlas and studiously ignoring all the marked abbeys, museums and other things that get the rest of us a little hot under our Barbour collars. Google maps may be filleted of all the things that, to us, make life interesting, but they’re not really pretending to do anything else. And they do have a quite significant ace up their sleeve, in that just one click of the mouse will give you the most stunning aerial views of pretty much anywhere on Earth, plus a basic road map to go with it. In any case, we are only in the very early stages of the digital-map revolution. They will continue to innovate and improve, as must we all. One day, I hope to be able to customise an online map with layers showing pubs from the CAMRA guide, second-hand bookshops, Indian restaurants, National Trust properties, lakes you can swim in, a majority of Welsh speakers, optimum sunshine hours and nudist beaches. If anywhere combines the lot, I’m moving there.
While it’s going to take a knock on the head for me to love satnavs, especially as they’re predicted to be programmed with even greater amounts of busybody nagging, when it comes to maps on the internet I need no such persuasion: the possibilities are endless and terrifically exciting. When I feel myself getting grumpy about the soulless, corporate maps online, or the internet sucking the surprise out of so many areas of life, I picture myself as a seven-year-old, craning his neck up to the delicious rows of Ordnance Surveys in the local library, and wonder what he would have made of it all. Or my grandfather, a mathematician and irascible polymath, who had his first go on a computer—my hulking tank of a thing, a glorified typewriter with a disk drive that took two people to lift—only a week before he died, and dissolved into wide-eyed, almost giggly wonder at its potential.
As with all things computer-related, there is an inevitable amount of the Emperor’s new clothes about online mapping. Applications are given fancy names and sexy descriptions, which then transpire to be little more than the cyberspace version of colouring in a map with a set of felt-tip pens. At least I had the decency to keep the ones I did as a map brat to myself. ‘Mashups’ is the big new word in web-based mapping: stick your data on to a Google map, jiggle it around a bit, dapple it with a few colours and pop-up text boxes or pictures before hyping it into cyberspace as something new and funky. Some really are: fascinating and imaginative ways of processing information, they bring an idea or story to life far quicker—and so much more beautifully—than any other. All too often, though, mashups are just like the rest of the internet, in that they’re all mouth and no trousers, incontinent egomania, electronic autism or vigilante paranoia.
There is—and this is something facing many of us—all too great a danger that our sworn affection for the paper map may become an unhealthy inability to cope with anything that has a plug on the end of it. That cannot be good. As many of these chapters have led me to conclude, there exists a strain of map addiction that starts to tip over into something quite alarming, be it obsessive pettiness and pedantry, a glowering suburban fascism, an all-consuming nostalgia for unspecific ‘old days’ or, quite likely, a rancid mixture of them all.
Take, for example, a publishing company that specialises in books on local and railway history, churning out dozens of worthy tomes that can doubtless be found on many the same bookshelf as a well-worn OS collection. Its big boast is that it has never yet used digital technology in any way, and has no intention of doing so in the future, as if to do so was somehow to climb into bed with the devil himself. Even to make an issue out of it, as this company does, suggests that it’s some kind of badge of pride (homemade, of course, probably with one of those kits from the 1970s that gives you a badge that’s ugly, badly cut out and the size of a saucer). Digital technology and desk-top publishing in books! Whatever next?
What map addict could possibly fail to be enthralled by the access we now have to most of the world’s great map libraries, these days just a click or two away? Or the ability to look in detail at every kind of mapping product—paper sheets included—on the exhaustive websites of the many different cartographic companies in just about every country on the planet? Or the scores of tantalising blogs and fan sites that bring absolutely every kind of map, from political to joke, from two hours or five hundred years ago, to our attention? In researching this book, I’ve been lucky enough to talk with dozens of fascinating map experts and addicts, some in person, some on the phone, some via email. The fact that I’ve been able to find them so easily has all been thanks to the internet; it is helping forge a far more democratic community of cartographers and map enthusiasts than the elitist conservatism of only thirty years ago. It’s the long-awaited, slow-burning victory of the amateur geek.
Just as the second-most-bullied kid in the playground is likely to be the one most fiercely kicking the crap out of the only one beneath him in the pecking order, so I joined in with the sneering at a former colleague who, when he got a little tiddly at someone’s leaving party, invited us all to challenge him on his knowledge of British postcodes. We could give him a town, and he would fire back with its first few postcode digits. Alternatively, we could throw him a TD12, a PO8 or a B91 and he would instantly come back with its location (Coldstream, Waterlooville and Solihull, in case you’re interested, and I suspect you might be). This was twenty years ago, before such things could be found instantly on a million websites, so we could only draw the conclusion that he spent long winter evenings with the Royal Mail postcode directory as his sole companion.
I was, of course, sneakily very impressed, and would sidle quietly up to him in the office kitchen for months afterwards, trying in vain to catch him out with an obscure Scottish postcode, but I don’t remember him ever failing in the task. Had he been around a hundred years earlier, he would have been cheered to the rafters in numerous variety theatres (‘The Great Postcodio’), sandwiched between a sword swallower and a Pearly Queen, but the modern age condemned him only to audiences of disdainful, drunken workmates. Duncan, I’m sorry. You are a hero.
Since they were first introduced in a trial scheme in Norwich in 1959, postcodes have quietly wormed into every area of our lives. After we’ve pressed 2, 6, 1, the hash button and 2 again, and waited thirteen minutes while we’re told how important our call is, details of our postcode is one of the first things any call centre will want to know. We’re telling them more than we perhaps realise. A year or so ago, I caught a fascinating programme on Radio 4 about the humble postcode’s ubiquity, and how it was increasingly used to define our perceived needs, shopping habits, government services and profile. In order to target sales, marketing companies split us all into eleven groups, further divided into sixty one categories, according to our code. ‘Motorway Magnets’ go to garden centres, read the Daily Mail and are likely to say ‘junction 7 of the M4’ when they’re asked where they live; ‘City Adventurers’, in their converted inner-city loft apartments, have stripped wooden floors and the latest KitchenAid Artisan food mixer; ‘Global Connectors’ are largely foreign, live in Chelsea or Kensington, read the FT and have yachts; ‘British-born Asian Entrepreneurs’ live in Tudorbethan houses in a doughnut around London, particularly to the north and east. On the radio programme, I was mildly alarmed to hear my postcode area mentioned in the context that we’re all written off as ‘Rural Isolationists’. What do we get? Gun catalogues and promotional offers on Kenny Rogers CDs?
By the early 1990s, Britain was thoroughly used to its postcodes—gone were the days I remember in the 1970s when elderly relatives would scratch it on to an envelope with as much concentration as if they were copying out the Chinese alphabet. A whole generation had grown up with postcodes as second nature, an integral part of their identity even, and the High Street started to reflect that. I remember first noticing the trend in Liverpool in about 1992, although with the local phone code, rather than postcode: T-shirts emblazoned with a huge 051. Clever, I thought. As with most smart ideas, it was quickly done to death, with phone codes plastering clothes and even as a name for bars, shops and things like taxi services. But then in 1995, British Telecom decided to slide a 1 in after the initial 0, and 0121 or 0141 didn’t look quite as cool or classy. The postcode’s moment had arrived: aspirational bars and meat-market nightclubs sprang up everywhere, from NW3 to BT1. Sporting your postcode as a name only really works in either a main post town that can use xx1, or a specific city code with some cachet (such as M20 for Didsbury in Manchester or W11 for Notting Hill). On that basis, and on very many others, the DY10 Nightclub in Kidderminster, so proud of being in the tenth division of the Dudley postcode, doesn’t quite make the grade.
While we go drinking in our local postcode, wear it on our chests and tap it into our satnavs to get anywhere, our neighbours in the Republic of Ireland miss out on all the fun. Ireland and Albania are the only countries in Europe without postcodes. In fact, Ireland’s address system is enough to make a British über-nostalgist weep, for not only are there no codes, they’ve not changed their thirty-two counties since 1606. Until the early 2000s, lacking a postcode was something of which people in Ireland were generally quietly proud, and boasted how they weren’t bombarded so easily by junk mail as us on this side of the water. It also helped cement Ireland’s self-image and reputation as a place that took life at a rather more leisurely pace; the communications equivalent of letting your Guinness settle properly.
Such old-fashioned values won’t work on your satnav or online map, however: punching in a road name, when the road can be at least a couple of miles long, renders electronic mapping almost redundant. While this was annoying enough for individual users, it was causing massive problems for delivery and despatch companies, whose vans, on the strictest of schedules, could be seen lost in the lanes of rural Ireland on a daily basis. With the sharp rise in online shopping, this was fast becoming a major headache. Worse, ambulances and fire engines were vanishing into the ether too. The problem was only exacerbated by the use of traditional townland names in Irish addresses: these sometimes cover a vast area and can have many duplicate addresses under the one umbrella. That works just fine when the only person having to navigate their way through the minefield is the postman who knows every scattered customer on his round, but for anyone else, it’s impossible.
In 2005, disquiet had swelled to such a level that the government had little choice but to announce their intention of creating a national postcode system, promising to bring it in by 2008. Reviews and reports were commissioned, experts consulted, while the press and internet boards speculated as to what sort of system might be brought in. Then silence, the whole thing quietly shelved. The main obstacles seem to have come from the state’s postal agency, An Post, well aware that the EU is demanding the opening up of government agencies to private competition by 2010; An Post’s greatest commercial asset is its intimate knowledge of the idiosyncratic Irish system and it simply did not want to hand too much useful ammunition to potential rivals. Also helping to scupper the plans were disagreements over what kind of postcode system was needed, the fear of losing the traditional townland names, and the global credit crisis, which has left the Irish government coffers in a perilous state.
‘An Irish solution to an Irish problem’ is something of a well-worn maxim, but it’s ridden to the rescue yet again. Frustrated with the delays, one man decided to create his own postcode system for the whole country. With a background in marine and satellite navigation, Gary Delaney worked out a system based on geographical coordinates that gives every property a unique code, specific to within six metres—unlike the British postcode, which can group a dozen or more addresses together, sometimes significant distances apart. In June 2008, he launched the project online to considerable acclaim and has struck a deal with a satnav company to include his data in their systems. The alphanumeric Position Orientated Navigation Codes (or PONC, pronounced ‘punk’ and the Irish word for ‘point’) have been taken up with huge enthusiasm by mapping websites, couriers and many individual users. There’s the distinct possibility that the government may well adopt Gary’s system as the official one, as it will save it a vast amount of time, trouble and expense. For politicians, it’s a guaranteed win-win: they get a ready-made system at a knock-down price, and if anyone doesn’t like it (and you can guarantee that there will be plenty), then it wasn’t their doing.
People complained when maps started to get too technical and topographic, rather than expressive and essentially subjective. They grumbled at the imposition of contours, then grid lines, at the loss of antiquarian data, boundaries and isobaths, at new names, old names, different typefaces, too much detail, too little detail, colour shading and cover shots. Now that cartography is poised on the cusp of its greatest revolution for five hundred years, the voices of doom have swollen to deafening proportions, and their biggest terror is that we are breeding a generation who will not get the same chance that we had to become map addicts, that we are the last of a dying breed. Could that terror be masking the real fear—that those following us are going to be so much better equipped than we’ve ever been to make maps do what they want and need? That actually, it’s we, not they, who are going to be the poorer in the equation?
I can’t begin to imagine how exciting most schools would be these days for an aspiring map addict. Good teaching using the best of new, and old, technology would be absolute dynamite in a receptive young mind, and the extra stuff you could find out for yourself would take it to levels of excitement and enthusiasm that we couldn’t have dreamed of. According to Jonathan Breckon, spokesman for the Royal Geographical Society, schoolchildren are still taught mapreading (they’ve got their free OS to play with, for starters), but also get introduced to data presented digitally—and they love it, and have minds that are sufficiently elastic to take it all. ‘Geographic Information Systems [GIS] have revolutionised geography in schools,’ he says. ‘Teachers have found that they bring the classroom alive. Maps can be beautiful in a way that information on a screen can never be, but there is no question that technology has the wow factor. When we do courses on Google Earth, they sell out completely. One of the advantages is the sheer quantity of information you can show on screen, and the fact that you can zoom in at different levels. You can track panthers in Africa using satellite navigation.’
He does sound a warning note, however, that will keep on board the addicts of paper maps (or ‘dead-tree maps’ as the cyber-evangelists disparage them on numerous breathless blogs). ‘You’d be bonkers to rely on Global Positioning Systems completely. Power fails, technology fails, and it’s controlled by the US military.’ It’s not an either/or, an artificial scrap between the paper maps and their electronic upstart siblings. In the glorious world of map addiction, whether we’re fifteen or fifty, we can have it all. Though I’ll still pass on the satnav, thank you.