Maps, and why you should love them more

I'm going to recommend watching the BBC4 series 'Maps: Power, Plunder and Possession" even before I've seen it, because I love maps and everything about them - the artistry, the politics, the sense of a place frozen in time and space, the unreality of them, and the sheer human arrogance of marking out possession on the unstable crust of a spinning metal ball in the middle of nowhere.

I use maps all the time in my work, in my life, probably a lot more than most people do because I use them as a canvas for my tours and treasure hunts. Wandering the city streets holding a 1:2500 printout marked with arcane signs and arrows is a common theme in my professional life, but I also use maps for the things other people use them for - going to work, going to the pub, finding the hotel, etc etc.

Aside from anything else, I have a terrible sense of direction so I rely on maps an awful lot. And the most interesting contention that the series makes is that the modern map, the one we think of as normal and the most obvious way to represent the world, is anything but. So I'm going to watch it and see how that happened, and I recommend that you do the same.

Clearly it's on at some stupid time of night, so catch up with it on iPlayer. Silly television.

http://bbc.co.uk/i/s2wvh/