The British Library has an exhibition on called “Secret Maps”. I like maps, and I like some secrets, so I went to the exhibition. I’m not sure the name is a good description, it’s more about the politics of maps. Sometimes, that’s trying to keep a map secret, but it’s more often about what is included or ignored in a given map.
There is a map from apartheid era South Africa where Soweto isn’t shown, the hundreds of thousands of people not being acknowledged until the later post apartheid maps in the 1990s. There was a video about the ongoing “Map Kibera Project”. Kibera is the world’s largest informal urban area. Somewhere between 500,000 and a million people live in Kibera with no official census or maps of the area. There is a local effort by some of the inhabitants to create a map, using GPS receivers and the open street map project. As well as being useful in the day to day life of the inhabitants, the maps are very useful in talking government agencies and getting them to try and improve conditions.
In the 19th century England and Wales were the last parts of Britain to get mapped in detail. The exception was the south coast, where the maps were needed in case of a French invasion. When the government started mapping England, large landowners argued in the House of Lords that this was a violation of their privacy.
Maps can be used as tools for individuals to go to places, and sometimes governments want to keep them secret to control where people can go. But for a government a map is a way of seeing the world and telling other people what they should see. And having control over that can be life changing.
Oh, and one of the coolest things in the entire exhibition, has almost no relation to any form of maps is a 14th century illuminated book called the “Secretum Secretorum” or “The Secret Book of Secrets”. That’s probably enough secrets to justify the first part of the “Secret Maps” title by itself.