UK Edition
Review
The maps that charted the 20th century: a beguiling new exhibition at the British Library
The 'Maps and the 20th Century' show at the British Library is a treasure trove of curiosities, writes Mark Hudson
This history of the 20th century viewed through maps frames its subject in challenging terms. On one wall, we have a large map of the world produced for British schools in 1901, highlighting the large areas of the globe then under the British Empire and pinpointing the sites of great British naval victories. Facing it, is a “gridded cartogram” of the world in 2016, a satellite image in which geographic areas are resized according to population – so India and China, for example, appear even bigger than they are – and large cities show as dazzling masses of light.
So, on the one hand, there’s a static view of a world dominated by an empire on which the sun proverbially “never set”, on the other an amorphous morass in which nation states have dissolved into areas of darkness from which the dispossessed of the earth are desperately moving towards a few massive metropolitan centres – ie the world we now encounter in the news every day.
The 20th century started, we learn, at a point when the mass of the British population were becoming conversant with map-reading for the first time, and ended in a world where everyone’s every move was increasingly being mapped by forces of which, in most cases, they weren’t even aware. So far so fascinating. But if that suggests the kind of immersive, conceptual approach where we might expect to walk through different cartographic “experiences”, this is the British Library, where the emphasis is inevitably on their vast and stupendous collections of books and other printed matter. A history of the 20th century through maps turns out to be, well, a large number of maps.
These do, however, take diverse forms from the outset: The Map that Came to Life, a delightfully innocent children’s book from 1948, designed to encourage map-reading, contrasts with a bleak plan of proposed train-line closures from 1962. But maps tend for practical reasons to be similarly sized, which gives the exhibition a slightly numbing uniformity of scale, and while you might assume maps took almost limitless forms, the vast majority of the exhibits use standard familiar Western cartographic patterns.
Many of the exhibits, indeed, are not only sized like your standard Ordnance Survey map, they look not unlike your standard OS map, even when they’re of key sites in the Boer War or the 3rd Battle of Ypres. Indeed, if the Last Post sounding at the Menin Gate unfailingly bring tears to the eyes, a contour map of the area where the battle took place will leave most viewers strangely indifferent.
The Holocaust is represented by a plan of Auschwitz constructed by the Allies from verbal reports, a brief letter to the Foreign Office from the Jewish Agency for Palestine – “herewith plans and descriptions of the two death camps” – and an aerial photo of the camp. By this point, you’re torn between being moved by the fact that such horrors could be reduced to this stark body of information, or exasperated by the matter-of-factness of the map-making process itself.
By their very nature, maps require interpretation, and everywhere exhibits that are immediately striking here are offset by ones that require reading of the rather lengthy labels to make any sense at all. A student protest map of the University of California Berkeley from 1971, the height of the Vietnam War, littered with images of atrocities and showing the locations of departments believed to be funded by the Department of Defence, takes us powerfully to a particular time and place. The exhibit next to it, of the Vietnam-Laos border, used in planning American bombing raids, will be for many visitors “just another map”.
The exhibition livens up in the post-war period, when maps were used in increasingly imaginative ways, from Cold War propaganda to commercial hard-sell. A rather beautiful “tourist” map of Hiroshima, turns out, chillingly, to be aimed at Western visitors come to view the atomic bomb damage, while a detailed plan of Brighton is written, on close inspection, entirely in Russian – for use presumably in the event of an invasion. If a Sixties comic map given away in parts with Weetabix makes use – the exhibition feels obliged to tell us – of “racial stereotypes that would not now be considered acceptable”, a map of “Gay London” from 1982 shows two blatantly stereotyped gay men talking to a Beefeater.
While this show is chock-full of exhibits that are fascinating in themselves, it struggles to fight off a sense of dryness, perhaps because of the very nature of the subject. Maps reduce the immediate, sensual world to schematic plans and ideas. For some that is very heaven, for others sheer torture. The rest of us will find much here to intrigue and entertain, while wondering at the mind-set, evident in much of the curation, that finds, say, the subtle differences between hand-drawn and printed maps of the Saudi Arabian capital absolutely electrifying.
Until March 1. Tickets: 020 7412 7332; bl.uk