Drawn to Map: On Feeling Our Way Through Space

A couple of years ago, shortly after moving to London, I began working in an independent bookshop in Tower Hamlets. Between shelves lined with titles on the radical Jewish East End and the Bangladeshi communities of Brick Lane, I came across a collection of old Ordnance Survey Maps of East London. They showed me places I’d only vaguely heard of – Limehouse, Rotherhithe, Wapping – and mapped, frozen in time, as they looked in 1805 or 1923. I was instantly hooked. I didn’t know what these places looked like in 2023, but I felt a compulsion to buy all the maps, make my way there and compare then to now.

There’s a particular thrill of spotting a street you walk on, or even have lived on, on an old map. It feels a bit like seeing your local pub in a sitcom or hearing your town name in a pop song. Suddenly, your everyday pavement has been elevated to something worth writing about, something worth mapping. 

The emotional quality of looking at old maps is evident in their historical ornateness. They’re often beautifully inefficient, more decorative than directional. They can be filled with flourishes, sea monsters and wobbly lines preoccupied with expression rather than precision. They reveal that these weren’t simply made to guide, but also to record how the places both looked and felt. 

These old OS maps I spent far too much money on aren’t beautifully ornate – they’re simple maps showing me Bethnal Green in 1918 or Glasgow West End in 1894, but they evoke such a lot. A recent study for the University of Cambridge, by Dr Elisabeta Militaru, explores what types of places evoke nostalgia; blue spaces, green spaces are dominant however specific urban spaces frequently come up. The study unpacks how nostalgia brings places into focus and ‘in doing so connects our past self to our present and future self’. When I stare at a map of 19th-century Edinburgh and find the street of my old university flat, I feel nostalgic but also valuable; the past versions of dwellers on that street have been recorded and we’re assured we will be too.

Today’s mapping culture, however, largely resides in our phones, which has a distinctive duality between the comfort of access and an underlying eeriness of surveillance. My personal algorithm is filled with urban geography accounts, documenting everything from manhole covers, ghost signs and lost pubs. I find myself continuously checking @caffs_not_ cafes or @londonpubmap to know where to go and what to do next. These accounts celebrate the value of locality. I’ll often find myself standing on a street corner I’ve never visited, with an intense feeling of déjà vu running through me. But is that just because the Pret and the Costa are positioned very similarly on a different street? Local historical features – such as an out of use railway line – can shake us out of this recurrent mental state, rooting us in a specificity which fosters pride in our sense of place.

Illustration by Amy Lauren

The utilisation of online maps in this niche, obsessive and sometimes algorithmic way can feel really pleasurable and very intimate. Via shared Google Maps, my friends and I often pin our recommendations of our known areas and send across the fruitful lists. I recently received an ‘ultimate glasgow reccs’ list annotated with notes: “good for a quiet pint” and “lovely garden in the back for a sunny day”. And suddenly, I was in my friend Lucy’s Glasgow, creating an emotional bond through blue dotted directions. 

Online maps undeniably warp the world; we’re often most familiar with the bird’s eye view of locations sequestered in the four corners of our phones. Spotting something in satellite view and then stumbling across it in real life, weathered, cracked or still standing, can feel distorting but also quite magical. We become flaneurs – not in an aged Parisian arcade, but on some random A road, the satellites sharpening the places around us.

But, of course, this comes with a chilling home truth. These emotional ties can make us feel as though big tech companies work for us, purely a tool providing a service. But, in reality, we share a handful of dinner recommendations and soon after we’re advertised nearby hotspots with their unbeatable Monday pizza deal. A shared recommendation between friends is flattened into something far more sinister. 

Find my Friends and other tracking apps blur that line. I use such apps to check if my flatmate is home safe or to know who to call to check whether I need to pick up milk on the way home. But there is always a (very rational) low hum of surveillance dressed up as care and access. Often I forget when spotting others on the map, that I can be spotted too. 

Despite this disquiet, maps – whether digital or physical – tell us stories about where we’ve been and who we are. But I don’t buy old maps from Ebay or charity shops with this grand idea of ancestral storytelling in mind – often I just want to show the people in my life something funny or interesting I found. Sometimes it just feels really good to hold something in your hand that has no immediate utility. They can be not just tools but traces.