History of Britain in Maps - Philip Parker ***

By Brian Clegg

As someone who earns most of my living from writing books it is genuinely painful to be negative about whole classes of books, but for me, there are definitely three circles of bookish hell.

The worst, without doubt, are adult colouring books. I once upset Alex Bellos by being snarky about a mathematical adult colouring book he wrote the words for, both because it missed the opportunity to give far more text to accompany the pictures and also because… well, it was an adult colouring book. But that was arguably one of the better examples of the species.

In the next circle come the coffee table books. These seem now to be something of an endangered species. You don’t see them as much, perhaps because fewer people have coffee tables these days (or perhaps because there’s less pretentiousness in home decor – we have less of the Changing Rooms vibe). The idea of a coffee table book is that it should be large format and picture driven. No one is intended to read it from end to end – it’s just to flick through when you need a minute or two distraction.

Coffee table books are not always disastrous – I was quite impressed, for example, by Images from a Warming Planet, for instance, (and if I’m honest, my own Scientifica Historica has something of a coffee table vibe, though there is a fair amount of text).

Finally we reach the circle of the gift book. Some of these can be excellent, even if their entertainment timescale is quite short. I loved my copy of Jan Pienkowski’s pop-up book Haunted House (which I was given as an adult). I am very fond of How it All Works, which I think I can say because I only wrote some words to accompany Adam Dant’s wonderful artwork. And I was transfixed by the J. M. Richards/Eric Ravilious book High Street (which I really did encounter on my sister-in-law’s coffee table, but is far more than a coffee table book).

Gift books can be a godsend when trying to buy a present for that ‘difficult to buy for person’ – which is probably why I get so many. Which brings us on to the titular topic of this review, History of Britain in Maps. It was originally published by Collins but has been reissued by bargain bookstore Postscript Books, who rather oddly are selling it at a discount of £1 more than the list price.

It sounds really quite positive in the description: ‘Including the earliest known map of pre-Roman roads and one showing Beeching’s proposed cuts to the railways in the early 1960s, Philip Parker presents reproductions of around 90 maps and uses the complex information they contain to trace the history of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland from prehistory to the 2016 EU Referendum.’ We’ve got, to pick three at random, the Hereford Mappa Mundi (though the partial image in the book doesn’t really give the feel for its structure), a sketch map of Elizabeth I’s Norfolk progress in 1578, which at a glance could be a constellation, and the ground plan of the 1851 Great Exhibition.

In theory, many of these maps could be quite interesting. But in practice, I really struggled to find any enthusiasm to do more than flick through a few. I certainly won’t be going through it end-to-end. By all means buy gift books, but I do recommend at least reading the text for a few pages before buying them. 

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Now Appearing is the blog of science writer Brian Clegg (www.brianclegg.net), author of Inflight Science, Before the Big Bang and The God Effect.