Pioneering geological map remade in stone
They call it the map that changed the world. And you can see the artwork it inspired in York’s Museum Gardens. William Smith, known as the father of English geology, created the first geological map of England and Wales in 1815. The first large-scale map of its kind ever made, it underpinned the Industrial Revolution, as well as helping to more accurately establish the age of the planet Earth.
Born in Oxfordshire, Smith was the son of a blacksmith and lived on a farm. Always good at geometry, he taught himself surveying, and it was during his work as a canal surveyor that he realised that fossils of a given species always occurred in the same stratum. That led him on the path to publish A Delineation of the Strata of England and Wales with Part of Scotland , in 1815. The expense of producing the map limited the print run to only 400 copies, and later, he spent some time in a debtors’ prison. Fair recognition only came in 1831, when he was awarded the Geological Society of London’s Woollaston Medal, and became part of the team that selected the stone to be used in the rebuilding of the Houses of Parliament.
Info
Address Museum Gardens, York YO1 7FR, +44 (0)1904 687687, www.yorkshiremuseum.org.uk, enquiries@ymt.org.uk | Public Transport 4-minute walk from Marygate car park. Closest bus stop: Museum Street | Hours Daily 7:30am–6pm| Tip Don’t just seek out the mosaic; explore all ten acres of Museum Gardens, which includes a vast collection of botanical plants – and plenty of tame squirrels.
From 1824 to 1825, Smith gave a successful series of lectures to the newly formed Yorkshire Philosophical Society. This also launched the career of his nephew John Phillips, who became the first keeper of the Yorkshire Museum, now home to one of only 150 surviving maps. So it was fitting that, in 2015, to mark the bicentenary of the map’s publication, the Yorkshire Philosophical Society commissioned a new artwork in honour of William Smith. Artist Janette Ireland created a stone mosaic in the grounds of Museum Gardens which represents the Yorkshire section of the map – thus neatly combining geology and history.
The mosaic’s location is symbolic too: found on the grounds of the ruined St Mary’s Abbey, it is also on the route that links the Yorkshire Museum and York Art Gallery.
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