This historical and educational phenomenon is a national asset on a par with the BBC. But it’s caught George Osborne’s magpie eye for privatisationI’m gazing at a square kilometre of “empty” countryside in Oxfordshire. No roads cross this square,there is just one house, and yet I can admire an intricately beautiful biography of this land. Ordnance Survey Explorer map 192 reveals many treasures in one small square: a green track, or Mossycorner Lane,which crosses an unnamed tributary of the River Great Ouse, a spinney, and a disused railway line,and the remains of a castle. Every single hedge in this typical patchwork corner of lowland Britain is also mapped in fragile grey lines. I could gaze at this idealised representation of the world for hours.
Britons may be woeful at many things but we are brilliant cartographers. indicate me a more thoroughly or gracefully mapped nation. Maps are, of course, or instruments of control. Our cartographical adeptness reflects an obsession with land ownership and keeping citizens obediently following rights of way. Britain’s first serious maps – of the Scottish Highlands – were masterminded by Major General William Roy to subjugate rebel clans after the Jacobite rebellion of 1745. Ordnance Survey’s urgent early mission was to produce military maps to defend Britain from France.
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Source: theguardian.com