Shortlisted for the Galaxy Popular Non-Fiction Book of the Year Award 2011.
How did we end up with one of the best mapping systems in the world, what is the Ordnance Survey and how did it originate? Rachel Hewitt’s history is comprehensive and reveals those early days, the military need for accurate mapping and the men who carried out the detailed and exhausting work to make those first maps. While I would have appreciated a full history of the Ordnance Survey, this at least does give the reader a detailed look at the beginnings of our obsession with maps.
Map of a Nation A Biography of the Ordnance Survey Synopsis
Map of a Nation tells the story of the creation of the Ordnance Survey map - the first complete, accurate, affordable map of the British Isles. The Ordnance Survey's history is one of political revolutions, rebellions and regional unions that altered the shape and identity of the United Kingdom over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It's also a deliciously readable account of one of the great untold British adventure stories, featuring intrepid individuals lugging brass theodolites up mountains to make the country visible to itself for the first time.
Rachel Hewitt completed her doctoral thesis at the university of London in 2008, and is currently a Research Fellow at Queen Mary, University of London and Westfield. She is the author of Map of a Nation: A Biography of the Ordnance Survey (Granta Books) which won the Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Award for Non-Fiction, awarded to authors engaged on their first major commissioned works of non-fiction.
