Mapping and drawing

As the previous post makes clear, I’ve always liked maps, and find them fascinating. Their variety, and the sheer skill of the people who make them, is admirable, as is the ingenuity with which so much information gets included on the best maps. The task of collecting the information needed to make a map, and to transfer it to paper, is a formidable one, even today, when satellites and computers make it easier, and when we are apt to look at maps not on paper at all, but on some kind of screen. I quickly learned that there were many ways of doing this, and that the surface of the earth can be represented in a host of different ways. As well as the one or two OS maps covering the local area, there were also other kinds of maps at home. Apart from a World Atlas (I remember being told it was out of date, but then they nearly always are), there were some guide books with maps in them, ones like the example above, showing the part of Gloucestershire where I now live, from one of the series of Shell Guides to the English counties. This uses colour to show relief – high land in increasingly deeper orange – and different colours to indicate different grades of road. Railway lines are in black, with stations marked; churches are another kind of building indicated, with a tiny cross; one or two landmark buildings (especially castles) are also marked. There’s not much more fine detail, but what’s there gives a good picture of the land, towns and villages, and major landmarks: it’s a serviceable map, produced in a pleasing style.

But there’s more to it than this. Maps are indeed immensely useful, to help us find out way around, and to tell us what’s on the ground, but they’re also pleasing in themselves – I’d say that maps, at their best, are art. Maps made before the last 30 years of the 20th century have a ‘drawn’ quality to them – after all, someone did draw them originally – and when the drawing has been done well, the result looks attractive, as well as being clear to read. To make the map above, which shows the edge of the Cotswold Hills near Cheltenham, someone working for Bartholomew & Co, who provided the maps for the Shell Guides, actually formed each letter with a pen; they would also have drawn in pen the other black lines on the map – the key lines running along the outer edges of all the red and orange roads, for example, and the flowing black lines that mark the railway lines. Probably on a separate layer, all the colour – such as those shades of orange for the uplands and green for the lowlands – would be added. This was all an enormous amount of hand-work by skilled people, unsung and dedicated, for the benefit of users who appreciated clarity, richness of information, and, I’d say, a result that’s visually very satisfying.
Perhaps I can further demonstrate what I mean by this ‘drawn’ quality by showing a plan of a castle from a 1960s guide book to Norham Castle.* This is one of a series produced by the British Department of the Environment (and their predecessors the Ministry of Public Building and Works) of ancient monuments. The plan was pasted into the back of the guide book, and when you unfolded it you could see at a glance the buildings, earthworks, and other features on the site. The lettering is done in strong calligraphic capitals, the buildings are shaded in different ways to indicate dates of construction,¶ and there’s a clear scale.† Best of all, eloquent strokes of the pen called hachures indicate the ups and downs of the terrain – the thicker end of each hachure is where the higher ground is, the lower ground is indicated by the narrow end.§

I’ve had hours of pleasure walking around castles, hill forts, monasteries and so on, holding a map like this, working out the history of the structure as I go. On a breezy day, the map would flap around, and if one didn’t hold it carefully, it might tear, or even slip out of the fingers and take a short flight like a rather ineffective kite, leaving one, coat similarly flapping, in pathetic pursuit. But I soon learned to hang on, and received both instruction and entertainment as I did so. Nowadays English Heritage produce much glossier guides, with full colour maps and illustrations, as well as putting up interpretation boards here and there to tell visitors about history and architecture. All very good. But there’s nothing to beat the clarity and artistic integrity of these old plans – or of the more conventional maps, sometimes also with hachures, with which we once guided ourselves around the country.

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* Norham Castle is by the River Tweed, one of the medieval defences of the border between England and Scotland. It’s also the subject of a glorious late painting by Turner.

¶ No colour printing was used – these guides were inexpensive and colour was costly in 1966. The guide to Norham Castle cost just 2 shillings and six old pence (a mere 12.5 pence in today’s money), map and all.

† The metres have got cropped off my photograph.

§ Another nuance of meaning is that the closer together and thicker the hachures are, the steeper the gradient being represented. Many modern maps that use hachures represent them as elongated triangles: these tend to have a more stylised look, without the hand-drawn quality of the earlier ones.

A church, a meal, a view   

Shared experiences, and the common frames of reference that they create, are among the boons of friendship. Sharing particular memories – of an event that happened long ago, a book, a piece of music, a place – with someone else strengthens social bonds and makes vivid recollections brighter still. There are times when the merest allusion can click the connection firmly in place. Mentioning to the right person one surname from childhood, a single line from a book, a specific image from a description, can do it.

Something like this happened chez my friend Mr A the other day. ‘Where haven’t you been, round here?’ he asked, wondering what architectural delights, in his neck of the woods, he could introduce me to. I replied: ‘You know that bit in The Shell Guide of Rutland where the author, W G Hoskins, says that the churchyard at Tixover is a good place for a doze? Well, I’ve not been there.’* Mr A is the only person I know who would respond to this allusion with instant recognition and approval, so off we went to Uppingham, to buy food, including an excellent pork pie from Culpin and Son,† and made our way through the October sunshine to Tixover.

It is obviously one of those villages that relocated centuries ago, leaving the church isolated and the few houses along a lane a few fields away. So when you arrive in the village you pick up the key to the church from a farmhouse and drive on, through a farmyard, along a track, and across a field. You come to a halt in front of a small church with a squat Norman tower and a nave and aisles with rectangular, Tudor-looking windows.‡ There’s no noise apart from a distant mechanical whine¶ that could be an aeroplane but may also be some sort of farm machinery; other than that nothing, apart from an intermittent, faint tapping coming from one of the trees, as if of a woodpecker who couldn’t be bothered to peck really hard. The ideal setting for an alfresco meal of pork pie, samosas, and ginger beer in the churchyard.

Inside the church we enjoy medieval carved capitals of various dates, a Jacobean monument, and the pattern of quatrefoil windows projected by sunlight on to the walls. And some interesting 17th-century stained glass panels, which we admire and scratch our heads over – they look imported from elsewhere.§ Then the bonus – a view of the church from the other side of the River Welland. This view involves another trip across a field, this time on foot – to appreciate its setting among farmland, trees, tussocky grass, and water. It was all even better than I’d imagined from Hoskins’ description in the old Shell Guide that had set us on our way.

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*If it seems to you eccentric of two grown men to be reading an old guidebook to England’s smallest county, think again. The Shell Guide to Rutland, being by the great landscape historian W G Hoskins is very well informed and well written. Rutland has changed less than most English counties in the last 50 years too, so the traveller can still learn much from this guidebook’s account of the place and its descriptions of its towns and villages.

†This butcher does produce seriously good pork pies. As someone born in Lincolnshire, a county that prides itself on its pork products (especially its outstanding sausages), I know what I am talking about.

‡ There’s a debate about these domestic-looking windows. They could be Tudor or Jacobean; they’re unlikely to be 13th-century, which was the date proposed by the antiquary Thomas Rickman.

¶ It’s rarely perfectly quiet in the English countryside. There’s usually someone not far away driving a tractor, using a chainsaw, or shooting pheasants: people at work, and a good thing too.

§ Pevsner says nothing about them.

Illustration of the month: by S R Badmin

A post about the illustrator S R Badmin by Peter Ashley of Unmitigated England reminded me that I’d not uploaded an Illustration of the Month recently, and that I had an illustration I particularly wanted to share. It’s the artwork that represents Surrey in the old Shell and BP Guide to Britain (1964); in a slightly expanded version it also adorns the cover of one of the Shell Shilling Guides to the county, part of a series of short guide books – booklets really – designed to distill the essence of a county and present its highlights, in the interests of people getting in their cars to explore, using Shell petrol to get them there.

S R Badmin was one of the mid-century’s best illustrators of places, and one of the best artists of all for trees. Buildings frequently feature in his work, often in typical local styles that make them effective markers of location. His Shell and Picture Puffin books on trees have beautiful illustrations – many thousands of people must have learned the difference between oak and ash from his artwork.* Another favourite is Village and Town, a Picture Puffin he did showing different styles of local architecture, which I’ve mentioned before on this blog.

The Surrey image brings together a beautiful wooden landscape in the Surrey hill county with a good-sized house in the rural tradition of southeast England – red tiles on the roof, more red tiles hanging on the walls, white-painted window frames with small panes of glass. Badmin’s fine brush also pictures a domestic scene: a small girl runs to greet her arriving father who, hatted and briefcase-carrying, has just got home from the office. His wife, holding a trug and dressed in trousers, is also welcoming him – she has been gardening and has no doubt heard the car pulling up.

The composition is striking: although the view is unmistakably English, there’s something rather Japanese about the way it's laid out –  the way the tree trunk slices through the right foreground, echoed by some other trunks slightly further back, including straight pines and bendy silver birches. They lead the eye to the house, but also to the far distance, where successive layers of wooded hill country recede towards the far horizon. As usual with Badmin, there’s platy of detail to enjoy – plants and roots on the woodland floor, a National Trust sign, and, best of all, at the very top right, a perching bird surveying the scene. He’s a bit indistinct, this bird, and seems to have a pigeon shape but a bit of speckle to his feathers. Badmin was not an ornithological specialist (neither am I) so perhaps he’s just ‘a bird’, put there to stand for the viewer, taking in this very local scene, this typical bit of architecture, and a fleeting moment in a family’s day.

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* The illustrations in the Shell Guide to Trees and Shrubs were also used for a series 12 outstanding tree posters, produced by Shell for use in schools; collectors seek these out on eBay.

On the curve

I remember a few years ago a conversation with a friend about garages and what they look like, how most of them are either very boring or very unpleasant to look at, but now and then, one stands out from the crowd. Before long, one of us said, ‘Do you know the garage on the road between Ledbury and Ross on Wye, at Much Marcle?’ and the other one instantly said, ‘Yes! Isn’t it terrific!’ We’d both been admiring the building for years, and I can’t remember which of us mentioned it first. There are several things I like about it. The way it stands at a slight angle to the junction. The gentle curve of the roof, a curve followed by the attractive lettering on the front. The mixture of corrugated iron and wood. The building began life as a World War I aircraft hangar. It was bought by the Weston’s Cider Company, who are based nearby, in 1926, and they used it to maintain their vehicles as well as offering a general garage service. In the 1990s, Weston’s sold it, and it continues as a garage serving the general public.

Not everyone admires this kind of thing, of course. It doesn’t happen often that I find myself at odds with the Shell Guides, old books that I admire because they still have a lot to tell us about architecture and the sense of place. In the 1955 Herefordshire guide, author David Verey found much to like in Much Marcle, but his admiration was ‘in spite of its approach from the Ledbury road being marked by an ugly new garage’. Verey couldn’t wait to get on to the village’s old church and houses, the place’s polite architecture, as they say. I, on the other hand, wanted to linger here on the main road, taking in this small landmark as the motorcyclists whizzed by enjoying the challenging mix of bends and straights on the way to Ross and perhaps themselves registering, through an eye corner, a curving metal roof and a painted garage sign.

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Footnote: Garagistes may like another post that I did a while back, about two garages in Upton on Severn.

Another upward glance during the same visit to Worcester (see previous post) yielded this ornate George IV lamp and Regency ironwork. It originally formed part of the frontage of the Crown Hotel, one of Worcester’s old coaching inns, but now marks the entrance to Crown Passage, a shopping arcade. Coaching inns were once such a prominent and important part of the English scene and it's pleasing that the authorities of the city hung on to the old decoration of the Crown. The lanterns act not just as a mementoes of what was there before, but as effective beacons for shoppers heading for the mall. They're so much better and more characterful than the bland signage beneath them.

I am especially fond of old guide books, particularly the Shell Guides to the counties, which still have a lot to tell us about the spirit of the places they describe and the buildings one can find there. Browsing James Lees-Milne’s 1964 Shell Guide to Worcestershire I was pleased to see, amongst the other attractions of the city (the cathedral, the Guildhall, some beautiful Georgian houses) a fine Edwin Smith photograph of the lanterns and ironwork of the Crown. It’s good to know he noticed them too.