“The Spirit of Observation”: The Early Ordnance Survey and the British Culture of Patriotism
Rachel Hewitt
Symposium on “Shifting Boundaries: Cartography in the 19th and 20th centuries.” Portsmouth University, Portsmouth, United Kingdom, 10-12 September 2008
ICA Commission on the History of Cartography, International Cartographic Association (ICA-ACI)

ABSTRACT
The French Revolution exerted a profound influence on the function, representation, and meaning of space across Europe. One of the Revolution’s most tangible effects regarding this influence on space, and on English cartographical history, was the founding of the Ordnance Survey, Britain’s national mapping agency, in 1791.

My paper will explore how the OS functioned within the culture of early-nineteenth-century Britain, particularly in light of the cultural understanding of national space and landscape. It will explore how the OS was construed and responded to by civilian map-readers; and how such patriotic interpretations of cartography related to wider debates surrounding British national identity during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic War years. The Ordnance Survey fulfilled a crucial role in nationalist practice and propaganda. The paper will discuss responses and correlatives to the OS’s representation of space in the work of canonical writers (including William Wordsworth and Jane Austen). It will explore how OS maps functioned as icons for a newly-united kingdom; and were symbolic and real forms of surveillance, across private and public spaces alike. The Ordnance Survey sought to present a united British front to everything that sought to destabilise it.

https://history.icaci.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Hewitt.pdf