Maps

I have always loved maps. If there is a map in a room I nearly always end up looking at it at some point, imagining places and wondering who lives there.

One of my favourite shops in London is Stanford's, the map shop in Covent Garden. My shower curtain is a map of the world. And I have a big collection of well used city maps.

Maps can sometimes be beautiful things.

But maps have started to intrigue - and bother - me more recently. With the advent of Google Earth and online maps which allow us to quickly search and find places all over the world, I feel that the whole notion of a map, and the mapping of space, is entering our lives much more intrusively than before, and changing them in new ways.

I don't know why I am bothered by something so eminently practical and useful. What's wrong with maps?

Is it the illusion of surveillance and control that maps give us, the feeling that everything can be made visible from above, something taken to extremes recently when Google started a project claiming to 'map' the atrocities in Darfur?

Or is it something more to do with the coolness of maps, the natural-seeming way they stand for the real world, say exactly what is 'there', and deny alternatives?

I am thinking here of a map I saw in a school in Amsterdam which shows the world upside down, drawn from a different perspective to the one made conventional by European navigation, Greenwich mean time and longitude and latitude.

The world suddenly looks strange upside down, challenging us to rethink our routine images of space and direction, our bearings in the world.

Of course, it's only 'upside down' from one point of view.

Maps and Language

I got another insight into this bothered feeling about maps recently when I was attending a wine reception at a French language school.

While enjoying the wine and cheese, my eye kept being drawn to the map of France on the classroom wall. All French classrooms seem to have the same map, divided into departements, sometimes with little inserts for far-flung Réunion, Guadeloupe and Martinique.

As I traced with my eyes that familiar, beautiful patchwork of colours that makes up the image of 'France', I realised what it might be: that the link between a language, such as French, and a map, such as a map of France, was not something I could easily make myself as a teacher of another language, English.

On my classroom wall I have a tiny map of Britain; but it is dwarfed by a much larger map of the world, which comes in handy all the time.

This is not because I see English as the language of the world, though it is a world language (so is French). It's because the coupling of 'English' and 'Britain' is something I can't make and has never come to mind. It makes no professional sense to associate English as a language with a map of Britain (or indeed any other English-speaking country). The language has, if you like, been cut off from territory.

The French map seems inextricably tied to the French language in a way that English can't be, at least in my view. That's why the map of France intrigues me. It shapes - maps - language in a different way.

Maps capture and hold in place a view of the world, a representation of space. It's hard to see how they could be different.

But aren't they also texts - visions of the world that could be changed?

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On the politics of online maps see this article by David Reid at the BBC.