Map of a Nation (31 page)

 

O
N THE BASIS
of Mudge’s ardent support for publication, and now that the Interior Survey had finished its mapping of Kent, the Ordnance Survey could look forward to the appearance of its first map. In July 1799,
The
Times
advertised that ‘An accurate Topographical Survey of the County of Kent’ executed by ‘Mr William Gardner, chief Draftsman of the Board of Ordnance’, and ‘done from materials afforded’ by the Trigonometrical Survey, would be published ‘in the course of the present year’. But a year later, when Mudge read an account of the Survey’s progress between 1797 and 1799 to the Royal Society, the map had still not been published.

As the eighteenth century turned into the nineteenth, materials from the Trigonometrical and Interior Surveys of Kent lay in the hands of a
publisher
. William Faden was a highly trained engraver and map-seller, whose surname was the result of his Scottish father’s decision to ‘de-Scottify’ it in the wake of the 1745 Jacobite rebellion. He had compressed Mackfaden (also spelt McFadden) to Faden to avoid harassment from anti-Jacobite and Scotophobic Londoners. After a successful partnership with the map-maker Thomas Jefferys, William Faden inherited the business after Jefferys’ death. By the 1790s he had been appointed to ‘the place and quality of Geographer in Ordinary to his Majesty’, and had also become the chief supplier of
civilian
regional maps to the Board of Ordnance. When Mudge brought out the first volume of the
Account of the Trigonometrical Survey
in 1799, it was Faden who had published it. The Board of Ordnance did not have its own engravers, so Faden was the obvious choice.

Aided by a freelance craftsman called Thomas Foot and a number of assistants, Faden first reduced the six-inch Interior Surveys to the scale of one inch to a mile, which had been established as the standard of county
surveying
by the Society of Arts’ competition. Mudge had ruled out any larger scale because the maps needed to be portable, both for the requirements of the military and to conform to Enlightenment ideas about cartography. Small-scale portable surveys of the country were ideal for the development of routes for the transport of heavy artillery and regiments of soldiers. The Ordnance Survey was designed to accompany tacticians into the landscape. And the one-inch scale also made the resulting maps more affordable and accessible to the general public. After thus reducing the fair plans, Faden then compiled them into a complete county map and began the printing of the Ordnance Survey’s first cartographic creation.

To begin the publication process, the engraver marked the positions of the triangulation’s trig points with fine dots onto a sheet of hammered and finely polished copper. The plate was then heated and covered with wax, which was left to set. Tracings had been taken from the Interior Survey’s maps, and outlines from these tracings were cut in reverse into the waxen plates with a ‘graver’ or ‘burin’. This was a steel-cutting tool with a handle shaped like a mushroom, with an angled steel shaft ending in a very sharp face. The handle rested in the engraver’s palm while the index and middle fingers guided and steadied the shaft across the face of the waxy copper plate. The burin engraved the course of roads and rivers, and the outlines of coasts, buildings, fields and the perimeters of woods. Some maps in this skeleton state were distributed among army officers who had no time to lose in the formation of defensive strategies. Place names were next to be engraved and then the ornamental symbols that denoted different types of ground cover, such as miniature trees to represent woods. Last, the hachures were engraved, those clusters of tiny parallel lines that varied subtly in density and direction to denote the steepness of hills. This was the most time-consuming part of the process, requiring a hawk-eyed vigilance, and an absolutely steady hand. Each part of the engraving process was usually
executed
by a different specialist practitioner, and the highest pay was awarded to those responsible for the hills. (Consequently there were rumours of hills being
engraved where there were none on the ground.) Even though the Board of Ordnance had agreed to publication of the finished maps, they appear to have refused to let the working materials out of the Tower of London because of the sensitive nature of such geographical information. Almost certainly the engravers had to traipse to the Tower day after day, to do this work
in situ.

When the map had been etched, in reverse, printing ink was spread over the waxen plate. This was subsequently cleaned very carefully by hand, with a cloth, to make sure that ink was removed from everywhere but the indented lines. A sheet of paper was laid over the plate, and both were passed through a roller press that exerted a pressure of up to forty tons in order to glean every detail from the engraved plates. In order to effect the greatest transfer of ink to the paper, the plates were reheated slightly and the paper itself was damped. This could cause a slight distortion in the finished image, so when particularly accurate maps were needed, ‘dry proofs’ were created from undamped paper and cool plates, although this did result in a less dramatic contrast between black and white. Because the first Ordnance Survey maps were all monochrome, only one plate was needed per sheet, whereas coloured maps would have required a different plate for each hue. When the printing press was manipulated quickly, it could produce twenty sheets an hour. The copper plates themselves were capable of producing between 2000 and 3000 impressions before becoming too worn down to function properly.

Upon the production of proof copies of the map, Mudge turned to
verifying
the place names that had been marked on it. This was a thorny subject. Place names are not set in stone. The names of tiny details of the landscape, such as a dell or a beck, as well as large settlements and major roads, are all subject to change. They mutate over time according to the whims of landowners, the arrival of new members into a community, alterations in the landscape, changing fashions of pronunciation and spelling, local legislation, and so on. At any one moment in time, different communities may have
different
ways of referring to the same landmark. Toponymy derives from the Greek
topos
, place, and
ō
noma
, name, and it presented a mighty headache to early map-makers. Surveyors had to settle on one particular place name to
inscribe onto their maps, out of a plethora of historical and current
alternatives
. Some map-makers simply wrote down the first name they heard spoken aloud by a local mouth. But more rigorous surveyors applied
themselves
to unearthing the full range of historical and current variations, before making an informed choice.

In Britain, regional map-makers had been thinking hard about toponymy since the mid sixteenth century. Christopher Saxton, whose atlas of England and Wales had appeared in 1579, had asked local officials to provide
information
about their place names. But some had worried about undue reliance on such informers. The topographer John Norden had been anxious that even ‘the most carefull observer [might] bee led in the Mist by vulgare instruction’. The late seventeenth century marked a watershed in the history of research into Britain’s place names. When Edmund Gibson had produced a new edition of William Camden’s
Britannia
, he had set about correcting Camden’s original choice of toponymy by consulting historical sources to unearth variants, also sending copies of the maps to ‘knowing Gentlemen’ with requests that they might ‘supply the defects, rectifie the positions, and correct the false spellings’. Gibson’s practice formed a model for map-makers throughout the following century. Sometimes surveyors had exhibited their maps to the public, inviting helpful criticisms and suggestions. Often they had produced proof copies to circulate among the landed gentry or clergy. These methods guided eighteenth-century map-makers towards a preference for place names that were in current usage. This may sound obvious but, as we shall see, there were often good reasons for rejecting contemporary names in favour of their historical alternatives.

William Mudge undoubtedly felt himself under pressure when tackling the matter of Britain’s toponymy. There were no other formal bodies tasked with the standardisation of place names, and as a national mapping agency, the Ordnance Survey inevitably acquired an influential role as a toponymic police force and law-maker. In its early years it did not deviate from the
standard
eighteenth-century pattern. The surveyors checked the names of large towns and important parishes against institutional and, later, census records and then Mudge explained how, ‘to make the work as perfect as possible’, proof copies of the first maps were sent ‘to different persons in the County,
for the purposes of ascertaining whether or not the Spelling of Farms, Hamlets, &c. was correct’. Like his predecessors, Mudge relied chiefly on the advice of landowners and clergymen. Amendments to the maps’ toponymy were painstakingly etched onto the plates before the final print run. The whole process of publication, from the moment when the engraver first saw the sketch maps to this final verification of toponymy, was incredibly slow and expensive, and it took William Faden around eighteen months to
translate
all his material into a complete county map.

 

F
INALLY, ON
1 January 1801, the first Ordnance Survey map was released to the public. Constructed in four massive rectangular sheets, each one around thirty inches wide and twenty inches high, requiring four separate copper plates, the map advertised itself as the first offspring of the ‘General Survey of England and Wales’. It proudly stated that it was ‘An Entirely New & Accurate Survey of the County of Kent, with Part of the County of Essex’ that had been made by ‘the Surveying Draftsmen of His Majesty’s Honourable Board of Ordnance’, under the orders of ‘Captn. W. Mudge of the Royal Artillery, F[ellow of the] R[oyal] S[ociety]’. Faden was
acknowledged
as the map’s engraver and a smaller advertisement described how the Trigonometrical Survey’s measurements underpinned the whole. The map’s title resided underneath the Board of Ordnance’s coat of arms, which bore three cannon. In the bottom-right corner the map displayed a
dedication
from ‘their most obedient and faithful servant W. Mudge’ to ‘Charles Marquis Cornwallis’, Master-General of the Ordnance, and ‘the rest [of] the principal officers of His Majesty’s Ordnance’. Around the borders, a scale resembling a piano keyboard described Kent’s precise situation in terms of latitude (measured from the zero-degree line of the equator) and
longitude
(measured from the Greenwich meridian).

The Kent map presented an intricate black-and-white bird’s-eye view of the most south-easterly corner of Britain. It stretched from the Straits of Dover in the south-east to Winchelsea in the south-west, up to London’s East
End and over to the many tiny land masses, sandbanks, lighthouses and buoys that peppered the Thames estuary in the map’s north-east corner. Kent and south Essex formed a remarkably varied nub of landscape,
ranging
from the wetlands of Romney Marsh to the precipitous white chalk cliffs of Dover and the Essex marshes that were swathed in mist ‘like a gauzy and radiant fabric’. The slow erosion of a chalk, clay, greensand and sandstone ‘dome’ had created a series of ridges and valleys running east to west across Kent, known as the Kent Downs, which diagonally bisected the map. It also depicted the haphazard sprawl of the areas to the east of central London, including Hackney, Stoke Newington, Bethnal Green and Mile End. It is intriguing to imagine the map-makers surveying at this point where the capital city melted into the surrounding countryside, where the butchers of Whitechapel Road met the farms and fields of Hackney and Tottenham.

The Ordnance Survey did not provide a legend for the symbols on the map, but much was self-explanatory. Miniature trees with tiny shadows to the east were positioned in a haphazard arrangement and signified forests. In orchards they were arranged in neat ranks. Parks and pleasure-gardens were often surrounded by intricate palings whose interior was marked by
pointillist
stipple. Basic field boundaries were shown by lightly drawn lines, and those marked by trees or hedgerows were denoted with an occasional
scattering
of tiny spherical bushes. Parallel lines with a range of thickness and shading differentiated turnpike roads from minor and unfenced ones. A cross stood for a church, a tiny windmill was complete with four sails, and a lighthouse was recognisable as such. Cartography shares an etymological root with
cartoon
(both derive from the French
carte
, meaning card or paper), and a perusal of the icons that comprise the Ordnance Survey’s vocabulary makes that connection seem particularly close.