Maps do greater than display us the place we’re or lend a hand us to find the place we want to pass. They’re tough cultural paperwork, reflecting – and regularly shaping – the values, priorities and secrets and techniques of the societies that create them.
This lesson is delivered to shiny and on occasion unsettling existence within the British Library’s new exhibition, Secret Maps, which pulls on greater than 100 exceptional pieces to track the lengthy and tangled historical past of mapping as a device for each revelation and concealment.
From hand-drawn naval charts introduced to Henry VIII, to the satellite tv for pc information hoovered up through our smartphones, the exhibition explores how, throughout centuries, maps have given shape to energy, plotted imperial ambitions, and encoded anxieties about safety and privateness. Nevertheless it additionally shines a mild on how maps have empowered communities, memorialised injustice and contested authentic narratives.
One of the vital placing issues of Secret Maps is using cartography as an software of state secrecy. Most of the earliest pieces on show have been by no means intended for public eyes: confidential maps of the English coast commissioned for Tudor monarchs, intently guarded charts of “secret” buying and selling routes through the Dutch East India Corporate and categorized army plans for the D-Day landings. The shaping of data used to be, and regularly nonetheless is, an act of geopolitical technique.
Shut-up of the map of Europe, from the Rotz Atlas,1542 on show in Secret Maps exhibition on the British Library.
Justine Trickett/The British Library Board
A in particular evocative show pairs an 1876 map of Dover stripped of its army main points for public intake with a “secret” model, replete with each casemate (a fortified gun emplacement) and hill.
As one panel explains, such acts of omission, planned or in a different way, “reflect accepted priorities”. When authentic cartography leaves clean areas, it will possibly sign what the ones in energy would fairly no longer recognize publicly, or chance falling into enemy fingers.
Maps in warfare and protest
State secrecy is best a part of the image. The exhibition strikes throughout the maps used to look ahead to or orchestrate warfare. There are projected atomic assault plans for chilly battle London, clandestine surveys of army posts throughout the 1926 basic strike, and maps of jail websites which are hardly ever formally recognised. One fresh showcase, a cover made through inmates of Bullingdon Jail, visually and symbolically puts the prisoners “back on the map”. It’s a placing refusal to be rendered invisible.
Secret Maps additionally highlights the twin nature of mapping in social actions. Whilst some communities have needed to combat to be mapped in any respect, Kibera in Nairobi, for instance, has lengthy gave the impression as a clean area on executive maps because of its casual agreement standing. Others now to find themselves surveilled and uncovered through new sorts of cartographic information, comparable to thru smartphone location information amassed through apps together with many virtual shipping tickets. The transition from omission to unwelcome documentation – in particular thru neighborhood mapping and virtual monitoring – raises profound questions on energy, visibility and autonomy.
A D-Day making plans map appearing the jap part of Sword Seashore, the place British forces later invaded.
France 12,500 Defences Knowledge/British Library Board
In all probability essentially the most related questions raised through Secret Maps worry the intersection of mapping era and private privateness.
In an international awash with smartphones, credit cards and trip passes, our actions are frequently logged and mapped. As one showcase panel observes: “Every day, we unknowingly trade privacy for convenience.” Those “secret maps” of our actions are purchased, offered, and used to focus on us in tactics maximum folks by no means totally grab. It’s a contemporary paradox by which the act of mapping turns into each empowering and intrusive.
Crucially, the exhibition doesn’t deal with those as simply issues of era, however as questions of company. Maps have at all times each granted energy and threatened it, relying on who controls the knowledge, the dimensions and the narrative.
Secret Maps is at its highest when inviting us to replicate on those paradoxes. One central declare, echoed throughout a number of presentations, is that: “Maps shape perceptions, empowering some while disempowering others.” What’s integrated or excluded is never impartial. From colonial land surveys used to dispossess Indigenous peoples, to the “gay-friendly” town guides and Indigenous countermaps (that advertise views, wisdom, and rights towards the colonial or state cartography on show), maps have at all times marked the combat traces of legitimacy and erasure.
The exhibition does no longer shy clear of tough subjects. Maps tracing the infrastructure of apartheid, or the ones produced to facilitate battle or surveillance, sit down along playful artefacts comparable to the enduring The place’s Wally? books. The impact is to remind us that each one mapping, whether or not for journey, statecraft, or protest, is basically about keep an eye on: who will get to peer, who will get observed and who makes a decision.
An extraordinary glimpse at the back of the traces
With loans from the British Library’s archives and different nationwide collections, the exhibition gives a unprecedented glimpse into how states traditionally used maps to keep an eye on wisdom and venture energy. Nevertheless it additionally foregrounds resistance. Neighborhood reminiscence tasks, counter-mappings, and the rising use of open-source gear divulge what government wish to cover.
A 1457 map of Scotland, drawn through English chronicler John Hardyng.
Map of Scotland, from Hardyng’s Chronicle Lansdowne, 1457/British Library Board
As lead curator Tom Harper remarked throughout the outlet of the exhibition: “Mapping has responded to the human desire to explore and define our world but can also be used as a tool of concealment.” Secret Maps succeeds in making tangible those tensions, appearing how the map, ostensibly a impartial report, is at all times, if truth be told, a website online of contest.
Secret Maps isn’t with regards to the maps that divulge or stay secrets and techniques, it’s about how the ones secrets and techniques form our shared and personal lives. It’s a well timed reminder that each map is as a lot about energy, reminiscence, and id as about topography or route.
Whether or not you’re a curious citizen, a pupil of historical past, or a virtual cartographer, this exhibition gives an crucial lens by which to rethink the traces that form our global.
Secret Maps is on the British Library in London till January 18 2026.
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