Flogging off Ordnance Survey? Now that’s what I call Britain-hating
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Version 0 of 1. I’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, Mossycorner Lane, which crosses an unnamed tributary of the River Great Ouse, a spinney, 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 delicate 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. Show me a more thoroughly or gracefully mapped nation. Maps are, of course, 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 uprising of 1745. Ordnance Survey’s urgent early mission was to produce military maps to defend Britain from France. Flogging Ordnance Survey will erase a piece of our identity, one sheet at a time Wordsworth and other Romantics disliked these first maps, but today they would be won round. Not by Google Earth or collaborative online maps, but by the global gold standard: the mighty orange-jacketed OS Explorer series, which reproduces Britain in 403 maps of 1:25,000 scale. I recently walked up Mossycorner Lane during a long trudge from London to Birmingham. I got lost a few times but my eight Explorer maps were never, ever wrong, faithfully recording every wiggle of a thousand field boundaries. New OS maps offer a free mobile download too. Ordnance Survey is a government-owned company. The government no longer really needs it for military purposes and so fears are growing that George Osborne will sell it off. This would be a truly Britain-hating deed. Every Conservative (and everyone else) should rally round Ordnance Survey. It is a national asset to be proud of, a historic and educational phenomenon that tells the story of our nation in 460m features, enriching us as much as cultural crown jewels like the British Library and the BBC. What would be gained by privatisation? I know what would be lost: paper maps bring in only 5% of revenues; the remotest Scottish sheets of the pink-jacketed 1:50,000 Landranger series only sell two or three copies a year. Why would shareholders or foreign owners bother updating such maps? Flogging Ordnance Survey will erase a piece of our identity, one sheet at a time. Poetic justice for the BBC I was assailed by male poets all weekend. I chanced upon the Ted Hughes documentary on Saturday night TV, Lemn Sissay on Desert Island Discs, and then Roger McGough while stuck in traffic. Sunday night brought Philip Larkin. By that point, I’d heard enough male superstar poeticisms. But these programmes shared something else: they were all uncompromisingly intelligent and completely accessible BBC productions. I watched Ted on telly with someone who has absolutely no interest in poetry and she was gripped. A poetic case for the licence fee. Deer parks just aren’t scary Lyme disease, a bacterial infection spread by tick bites, is rising, and moving into the suburbs. It’s probably partly because there are more (tick-carrying) deer in Britain than at any point since the Ice Age – and more bare-legged people sharing space with them. But a tick scare shouldn’t stop us appreciating the least hazardous outdoor environment in the world: the British deer park. We simply need to check ourselves at the end of parkland frolics, carefully remove any ticks with tweezers and clean the bite. I’ve only been bitten once in 40 years outdoors. |