"EVERYTHING happens somewhere" would be a good motto for the Ordnance Survey, Britain's premier mapmaker since 1791 and now a leader in computerized map resources and their astounding 21st century applications.
The organization, a self-funded agency of the British government, devotes itself to improving modern life through the use of maps and stands as proof that the study of geography is alive and well -- in England, at least.
Americans who have heard of the Ordnance Survey (www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk) -- so named because it began as part of the British military -- may know it because they have gone walking in England, Scotland or Wales using one of the organization's 470 Explorer series maps. Designed on a scale of 1:25,000 (which means that 2.5 inches on paper equal a mile on the ground), the Explorer series is incredibly detailed, showing footpaths and public rights of way, Roman walls and telephone booths.
Ten years ago, I used the bestselling Ordnance Survey Explorer map of the glorious English Lake District to find my way from the town of Keswick to the hamlet of Buttermere, where I knew I would find a telephone because the map told me so.
Walking and the Ordnance Survey go sock in boot. When Parliament passed a law in 2000 opening new areas to the public, the organization began revising Explorer maps to reflect them. The massive remapping project is to be completed in March.
Maps fascinate me, so when I had the chance to visit the Ordnance Survey offices, I jumped. From its founding in the late 18th century, when the island nation desperately needed maps to defend itself, until 1841, the organization was in the Tower of London.
It quickly outgrew the tower and moved to Southampton on England's southern coast, where it occupies a huge, maze-like complex built in the 1960s. At that time, the Ordnance Survey had a staff of about 3,000, but computerization has streamlined the mapmaking process, so it now has about half the staff and plans to move to smaller quarters by 2008.
It still produces millions of paper maps a year for outdoors enthusiasts and vacationers. But in 1973, the organization began computerizing its stock of 230,000 map sheets, a 20-year process that resulted in the unveiling of a massive, state-ofthe-art geographical database known as Mastermap.
The information embedded in this digitalized English uber-map is constantly updated -- about 5,000 changes are incorporated a day -- and can be customized in remarkable ways for licensing to corporations, researchers, planners and government agencies.
