The British Library's "A Life in Maps
" is a brilliant, free exhibition at the British Library. The book based on the exhibition is already sold out and there's still 6 weeks to go - a good indication of its' success.
There's also a virtual exhibit but I'd recommend braving the cold as you need to be there in person in order to appreciate the detail and artistry of the cartographers, to flood your field of view with maps several meters across and to promenade around Regents Park with a room-length park panorama. It's also fun just eaves-dropping on the conversations of fellow visitors, there was such a wide range of conversations...from Victorian men's fashion to the geographic impact of modern family values....
The exhibition illustrates the increasing importance of maps in a world where the speed and distance of our travels means we can no longer communicate routes by word of mouth or remember all the landmarks and turns of a trail.
It makes a point of revealing how maps should never be considered "factual", and always have agenda, some more obvious than others, and the close relationship between cartography and power. It also beautifully illustrates how maps have not only tracked the development of London but have also had an important hand in shaping it. For example, we see the many plans for the redevelopment of London after the great fire, and maps by Booth which finally confirmed the true poverty of London's poor and led to social reform.
Although it doesn't make the point very loudly, by contrasting the rooms of highly-crafted, one-offs, commissioned for government use with the emergence of shared online GIS tools such as google earth and microsoft virtual earth, and a tiny exhibit that it's easy to pass by, tracking a project (run by Juliet Sprake) in which students critique and go about remapping London according to their own criteria, we become aware of the recent revolution in map-making through its democratisation.
