Map Of A Nation | Granta

  • Published: 07/07/2011
  • ISBN: 9781847084521
  • Granta Books
  • 432 pages

Map Of A Nation

Rachel Hewitt

Map of a Nation tells the story of the creation of the Ordnance Survey map – the first complete, accurate, affordable map of the British Isles. The Ordnance Survey is a much beloved British institution, and Map of a Nation is, amazingly, the first popular history to tell the story of the map and the men who dreamt and delivered it. The Ordnance Survey’s history is one of political revolutions, rebellions and regional unions that altered the shape and identity of the United Kingdom over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It’s also a deliciously readable account of one of the great untold British adventure stories, featuring intrepid individuals lugging brass theodolites up mountains to make the country visible to itself for the first time.

This is a brilliant book, and it's astonishing that no one has thought of writing it before ... History at its best

A N Wilson, Reader's Digest

Gripping [story] about the remarkable personalities who initiated the scientific mapping of Britain and their extraordinary feats of skill and endurance ... this is the first book of a young historian of whom more will be heard

Max Hastings, Sunday Times

Hewitt tackles the subject exuberantly ... the book won me over. The sweep of its history has true grandeur, and the incidentals of the tale are like desirables found in a cluttered antique shop

Jan Morris, The Times

The Author

Rachel Hewitt is the author of A Revolution of Feeling: The Decade that Forged the Modern Mind (2017) and Map of a Nation: A Biography of the Ordnance Survey (2010), which won the Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Award for Non-Fiction, awarded to authors engaged on their first major commissioned works of non-fiction, and was shortlisted for the Galaxy Popular Non-Fiction Book of the Year. She has a doctorate in English Literature and has worked at the Universities of Oxford, Glamorgan, and London (Queen Mary). She writes for various publications, including the Guardian, New Statesman and TLS.

More about the author →

From the Same Author

A Revolution of Feeling

Rachel Hewitt

In the 1790s, Britain underwent what the politician Edmund Burke called ‘the most important of all revolutions…a revolution in sentiments’. Inspired by the French Revolution, British radicals concocted new political worlds to enshrine healthier, more productive, human emotions and relationships. The Enlightenment’s wildest hopes crested in the utopian projects of such optimists – including the young poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the philosophers William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, the physician Thomas Beddoes and the first photographer Thomas Wedgwood – who sought to reform sex, education, commerce, politics and medicine by freeing desire from repressive constraints.

But by the middle of the decade, the wind had changed. The French Revolution descended into bloody Terror and the British government quashed radical political activities. In the space of one decade, feverish optimism gave way to bleak disappointment, and changed the way we think about human need and longing.

A Revolution of Feeling is a vivid and absorbing account of the dramatic end of the Enlightenment, the beginning of an emotional landscape preoccupied by guilt, sin, failure, resignation and repression, and the origins of our contemporary approach to feeling and desire. Above all, it is the story of the human cost of political change, of men and women consigned to the ‘wrong side of history’. But although their revolutionary proposals collapsed, that failure resulted in its own cultural revolution – a revolution of feeling – the aftershocks of which are felt to the present day.

Rachel Hewitt on Granta.com

Essays & Memoir | The Online Edition

Sympathy | State of Mind

Rachel Hewitt

‘Before motherhood, I had not thought much about sympathy.’