My name is Mike and I am a map addict. There, it’s said. I’m the one in the car with the map in his lap, following its route with rapt concentration and a slowly moving index finger—often at the expense of seeing the actual landscape it depicts rolling past on the other side of the window. I’m the one who, on buying my first house, moved my entire map collection into it and ensured that it was perfectly shelved in its new home before bringing in anything useful, such as a kettle, toaster or teabag. I’m the one who will annoy anyone I’m sharing a flight with by repeatedly jabbing at the window and telling them which town we’re flying over, just because I recognised its shape and road pattern from decades of idle map scrutiny (and by the same token, I’m now the one losing whole days on Google Earth). It’s me who’ll spend longer planning a walk than actually doing it, who has to get the map out to go to the shops, who actually enjoys those interminable conversations about which route we all took to reach wherever we are, who can recognise the symbol for a bridle track or lighthouse (disused) at forty paces, whose favourite childhood show was The Wombles, simply because the little recycling furballs took their names from Great Uncle Bulgaria’s atlas. Actually, that’s not quite true. My favourite childhood show was Ivor the Engine, which combined maps with its exotic setting ‘in the top left-hand corner of Wales’: two of my passions deliciously stirred by one antique animation.
At the age of six, I began my own map collection, kick-started by a joyous discovery. My first true love was found lurking in the cellar when we moved into a new house. Not only was it my first love, it was my first cellar, full of spiders and dusty promise. The previous owners had left various bits of tat below stairs which were a pure treasure trove to me. A peeling mural of the Sergeant Pepper album title, painted by their adolescent son, filled one wall. I had no idea what it was or what it meant, but it oozed cool and teenage pheromones. But the true object of my affections lay hidden, covered in cobwebs, in the back of a dusty alcove. A relief map of the West Midlands and Wales, a good three foot by two, carved out in brittle plastic, its moulded hills soaring. It was love at first sneeze.
There was the sinuous line of the River Severn winding its way up through the Worcestershire towns I knew so well. The Malvern Hills, punting proudly out of the flat plains, looked like the brassiere of some ’50s Hollywood starlet, all swaggering panache and perky promise. Like a spreading ink stain, the big pink blotch of Birmingham and the Black Country seemed in danger of engulfing the little flecks of urban outposts surrounding it, my own home town included. And Wales looked so different, and so very foreign. Where the English side of the map was a mass of pink splotches and a tangle of roads ancient and modern on a landscape that barely rose to any noticeable toy height, Wales was dark, brooding and rippled with mountains that soared and plunged in mysterious plasticity. Tiny settlements, hardly any of which warranted any pink stippling, peeked out from valley floors and river confluences. The crags of Snowdonia, by far the largest and lairiest on the map, shot skywards and soon began to lose their markings, so often did I stroke their peaks in eager anticipation of the day when these little plastic bumps would become real to me.
Hours I spent in rapt contemplation of that map. I memorised the look and shape of the conurbations, of Bristol, Stoke, Chester, Coventry, Cardiff, Brum, Manchester and Liverpool, so that I could recognise them, like a psychiatrist’s inkblot test, in an instant. I ran my finger appreciatively along river courses, feeling the way the Mersey, Wye or Dee bubbled down from the hills, along ever-widening valleys before disgorging into the smooth blue expanses of estuary and sea. But nothing approached the tactility of the Welsh hills, whose come-hither bumps and lumps kept inviting me back for more.
Before long, I’d started to save my pocket money in order to buy maps, the fuchsia pink Ordnance Survey 1:50 000 series in particular. My step-mum donated an old sewing box with a padded hinged lid for my burgeoning collection, and it followed me everywhere, even on daytrips to bemused relatives. But there were 204 of the bloody things to collect, and on a fairly meagre allowance, it was painfully obvious to me that it would take decades to finish the job, an unimaginable yawn of time to a youngster. As a result, maps even accounted for the modest zenith in my teenage shoplifting career. While my mates were nicking records, sweets or fags, I was making regular forays into the Midland Educational Bookshop in Worcester to fill my school bag with bright, gleaming Ordnance Survey maps.
It was way too easy. While eagle-eyed shop assistants kept close watch on the pens and pads by the till, it was as free as a supermarket trolley dash in the ill-lit, dusty corner where the maps lived. My routine seemed foolproof. Like most fourteen-year-olds of the time, my school bag was a long sports effort with a large zip going the full length. Before entering the shop, I’d unzip it and wear it over my shoulder, with my arm held around it, keeping it apparently shut. I was never so stupid as to go straight to the maps; instead, I’d weave a tortuous route under the shop assistant’s eye, picking over fountain pens and ink cartridges, ostentatiously examining maths textbooks, Bibles and anything else that I thought would make me look like some useless swot or a pillar of virtue. While the shop assistant was busy serving someone, I’d dive into the far corner where a huge stand of OS maps sat beckoning. By now, my heart was thumping in my throat, school bag at the ready, unzipped, on the floor. I knew in advance which maps I wanted, and restricted myself to no more than five at a time—well, I didn’t want to be greedy. With a sleight of hand that would have impressed Paul Daniels, I picked the maps in question and swept them with one movement into my bag, covering them with school files or my football shirt. Then I’d get one map off the stand and noisily open it out to examine with rapt attention. Equally ostentatiously, I’d fold it back up again and replace it in the stand. Leaning down to pick up my school bag, I’d quickly zip it up again and hurry towards the till, smiling as casually as I could. Usually, I’d buy a pencil, a biro, a rubber, a cheap book or a sheet of Letraset, just to throw the assistant off the scent, before escaping back into the street with relief and euphoria flooding through me after yet another successful cartographic heist.
As a result of my regular larceny in the Midland Educational Bookshop, my Ordnance Survey collection grew exponentially in a very short space of time. I restricted my looting trips to no more than once a week, although, in what I thought at the time was a genius stroke of alibibuilding, I’d nip into the Midland Ed at other times and flagrantly avoid the map corner altogether. But once a week, the urge for more maps, of more areas, would hold me in its vice-like grip and I’d be in there and seizing the whole of Cornwall or Norfolk in one greedy swoop.
My parents and their mates benefited hugely from my map rustling. By the time I was fifteen, I was the unofficial map library to half of Kidderminster. If anyone was heading off for a weekend in Aberporth or a trip to Auntie Ethel’s in Godalming, it was me they came to for ideas on planning the route and getting the appropriate maps. Little did these upstanding citizens realise that they were handling stolen goods.
Maps have punctuated every twist and turn of my life. During the mental meltdown of early teenage years, my happiest times were spent in the company of my grandmother, touring the Midlands in an aged Ford Corsair with map on my knee and no idea where we were going. I’d be given carte blanche with the navigation, and would take us off down lanes that, from the map, looked worthy of a snoop or which led to places with odd or amusing names. Without knowing it, we were early psychogeographers, conducting our dérive with a flask of tea and a tin of boiled travel sweets. We’d pop into churches, shops and pubs, peer over walls and fences, engage vicars and batty old ladies in conversation, throw sticks in rivers, drive down country roads that looked, from the features on the map, as if they’d afford a bit of a view. When they did, my gran would congratulate me on my map-reading skills and I’d glow with pride and satisfaction, sensations all too rare in my hormonal hothouse.
Many of those trips were anchored by the Fosse Way, the great Roman highway that shoots like an arrow from Lincoln to Exeter. My grandparents lived in Leamington Spa, a short hop away from the Fosse. For most of its course through Warwickshire,