Interview: Rachel Hewitt

Our Book Club recommendation for December is Map of a Nation: A Biography of the Ordnance Survey by Rachel Hewitt. Here the author discusses her work with Paul Lay.

What inspired you to write a book on maps? Tell us about the state of cartographical history.

As an enthusiastic hiker I’ve had a long-standing appreciation and love for Ordnance Survey maps. I remember being taught to map-read and navigate by my stepfather and the ability to translate the squiggles and numbers on the map into an imaginary picture of landscape was a real revelation to me. But, although that love of maps had been there for many years, my intellectual interest in the Ordnance Survey dates a little later from the end of my undergraduate degree in English literature. I’d developed a real love of Romantic landscape poetry. Then I discovered that the OS was founded in 1791, right at the beginning of the Romantic period. It seemed resonant that, at the precise moment that poets such as Wordsworth were metaphorically remapping the British landscape through poetry, that territory was being literally remapped by the OS. I wanted to investigate further, not only how those first maps were made, and why, but what sort of cultural impact the OS’s activities had.

Cartographical history is a wonderfully vibrant area. It benefits hugely from its hybrid nature: researchers come to map history from all sorts of backgrounds – from social and cultural history, from military history, from art history and literature and from non-academic areas too. This brings a real freshness to its methodology.

Who is the book aimed at?

I really hoped it would appeal to a wide range of readers: to those who, like me, love the OS primarily for its iconic folded maps and its association with rambling; but also to those who are interested in the history and culture of the French Revolutionary period and the Industrial Revolution. I really wanted to embed the OS in its historical and cultural context. The book is as much about national identity, the formation of the United Kingdom and the culture of patriotism as it is about copper-plate engraving, brass theodolites and triangulation. I hope it appeals to a general history readership as well as more specialised cartographic historians.

How did you research the book?

I started working on Map of a Nation after completing a PhD in Romantic landscape poetry and mapping, so a lot of my research for the book was able to springboard from that. But whereas my doctoral research was more concerned with general ideas of ‘mapping’ in the 18th century, the research for the book was more focused on specificities: the archives of the OS, their instruments, and methods, for example. I also wanted to attempt to bring to life the characters involved in the early OS: to try to piece together their backgrounds, obsessions and motivations. That was why the book has the subtitle A Biography of the Ordnance Survey: I wanted to tell the life of the institution through the lives of its most important personalities.

What does a map tell us about a nation and its people?

A national map is often an image of a particular conception of that nation. A wonderful book by Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood (1992), shows how, as Britain became more democratic, its maps changed to reflect that fact: coats-of-arms of local aristocrats, or even the monarch, were gradually displaced by images of the land itself. The period of Map of a Nation is the period of the birth of the United Kingdom and takes in the 1707 Anglo-Scottish Union and the 1801 Act of Union with Ireland. I was interested in how conceptions of national identity changed during that period and the role that maps played in cementing an idea of a united kingdom. For some, the OS – which mapped England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland – was an image of a happily united nation. Wordsworth used the OS in a poem as an icon of what he called ‘Britain’s calm felicity and power’.

What about the people you write about in your book?

The OS was established as a military survey and its chief personnel in its early years operated within a military context. They were mostly taken from the Engineering Corps or the Royal Regiment of Artillery. But I was struck by the way in which its directors were guided by motives that went far beyond military ones. The OS’s first real director was a man called William Mudge, who was descended from a remarkable Enlightenment family and numbered the portrait painter Joshua Reynolds, the actor David Garrick and the playwright Oliver Goldsmith among his family friends. This immersion in Enlightenment culture gave Mudge an expansive sense of the possibilities of the OS: he was intent on it becoming a national mapping agency, with responsibility to present British citizens with the first complete, accurate and up-to-date map of their nation. He always conceived of it as more than a military survey.