The Ordnance Survey has steadfastly mapped our lives for over 200 years.
During its long history, the OS has produced billions of maps...
..meticulously recording every square mile of our nation.
All 94,525 of them.
For me the Ordnance Survey embodies everything
that is best about being British -
the attention to detail,
the pioneering expeditionary fervour
that went into the initial surveying...
..and the continuing expertise that makes these maps
the best in the world.
Every city, village and town,
every street and every house has been mapped
by an army of boffins and intrepid adventurers.
Whatever it took.
We had no health and safety, no helmets.
We used to wear wellingtons so that you could put your spanners in.
It was like the Wild West, you know what I mean?
It's a triumph of great British design
and no-nonsense practicality...
OS 12 to OS 13,
will you move to the corner of the barn, please.
'I think you'll have to shoo the cattle out of the way, over.'
..and tireless dedication.
One side of an outdoor leisure map took two years.
Produced with such loving craft, the OS map has become our trusted guide,
ever ready to show the way to generations of holiday-makers,
weekend adventurers and ramblers.
VOICEOVER: As for maps, you can't beat the Ordnance Survey.
They're absolutely reliable and show all those off-the-highway haunts
the true rambler loves to explore.
After mapping the changing contours of the nation's life
through the decades,
now in the digital age of Sat Nav,
interactive and 3-D maps,
the OS is having to change itself.
But the Great British public's enduring love affair
with the humble foldout OS map is still alive and well.
If you go three steps outside your front door, that will be on a map.
You know, what other country can do that?
If you've ever ventured into the great outdoors,
chances are there's been an OS map stuffed in the rucksack.
We used to go on family holidays to a beautiful
part of the Yorkshire Dales
from about the age of six months upwards
and I remember very clearly when I was about eight,
my stepfather spreading an ordnance survey map
out over the dining room table in the cottage that we were staying in
and explaining to me the walk that we were going to do later that day.
To me, it was like being taught how to crack a code,
suddenly learning how to decipher all of these symbols,
these contour lines
and how to translate them into an image of the landscape itself.
My earliest memory is being shown how to use this
Ordnance Survey map, Sheet 126, by my parents,
who kept it among many other OS maps
on their bookshelves at home.
With this sheet here, I was able to go out into the countryside
of Norfolk on my bicycle, or on foot,
exploring public rights of way.
The public footpaths, the public bridleways, all those routes that
are not Tarmac and are therefore THE most exciting ones to explore.
Do you need a map? OK, Beth, there's your map.
There are two series of Ordnance Survey maps used by walkers.
Still out and about at the age of 83, Hugh Westacott is
a poster boy for the benefits of a lifetime's rambling.
And we are in lowland countryside...
Today he's guiding a group of walkers to Coombe Hill
on the edge of the Chilterns in Buckinghamshire.
There are 140,000 miles
of public paths in England and Wales.
There are more miles of footpath
than there are roads
but we are actually going to walk
along the top of a very steep escarpment.
If you look at those contour lines, it's very, very steep.
Is everybody ready to move off now?
And you know what we're looking for?
A steep hill down.
OK.
For over 70 years, the Ordnance Survey has taken Hugh the length
and breadth of Britain and it's never failed him.
I've walked from Land's End to Fort William relying
entirely on Ordnance Survey maps.
They're so remarkably accurate.
Because they're so accurate, it makes it easy to follow.
We're standing now at the viewpoint on the top of Coombe Hill,
which is probably one of the most striking views in the Chilterns.
You can see for hundreds of square miles.
I couldn't imagine England without Ordnance Survey.
It's one of our great treasures.
They're very handsome, they really are.
They're works of art.
I'm a dinosaur.
I much prefer paper maps to using GPS receivers
because the difficulty with the GPS is the screen that you look at is
so limited, you can't see the bigger picture.
Over more than 200 years of development...
..the maps have become a masterpiece of clarity and precision.
Ordnance Survey maps are probably the easiest
maps in the world to read.
They're very simple.
They have a very harmonious set of colours on them
that accord with psychologically the way
we need to absorb information.
For example, the big roads,
the dangerous bits are bright red.
The rivers are blue.
The woods are green.
There's a logic to the colour system,
so you're given a lot of help when you're using an Ordnance Survey map.
Among true devotees of the OS map, most agree that the
absolute pinnacle of the cartographer's art
is the 1 to 50,000 scale Landranger map.
In this series, the whole country is divided
up into 204 different sheets.
One kilometre of Britain
is represented by 2cm on the map.
For most of the history of the OS,
nearly everything on the map was drawn by hand.
A cartographer's training could take up to a year.
I started in the drawing school and I did practising drawing
and putting names onto maps.
Then after one year
I did a final drawing test, completed that
and then I was transferred to a large-scale drawing section.
I worked on very large-scale maps.
You drew the detail, you drew the rivers, you drew the cliffs
and the gravel pits and the railways
and the shores and the bogs.
All this detail came from years of the laborious legwork and
meticulous measuring done by the Ordnance Survey's men in the field.
VOICEOVER: Now to fill in the details.
Mark the starting points for the survey of side roads,
check the positions of fences and the fronts of houses.
One of the things that any surveyor out in the field had to find out
to put on the map was the names of places
and this caused all kinds of kerfuffle.
There is a wonderful field guide for surveyors
that they issue and they tell them in strict order
who they should believe for names.
It starts with clergyman and schoolmasters and doctors
and goes down, down, down the list
and then it says uncategorically don't believe the people who
live in the houses themselves, especially if they are labourers
or kind of common, basically, because they won't have a clue,
especially they won't have a clue how to spell it.
Once all the names had been spelt correctly, the surveyor's map
was then turned into the final work by the cartographer
on zinc plates.
The plates were then photographed and maps printed from the negative.
In the '50s and '60s, the men in the field were just that - men.
In the drawing sections, it was an admirably modern-looking workplace.
And almost alone among British institutions at the time,
the OS recognised this in the employees' salaries.
One of the big bonuses was that we were actually on equal pay
with the men.
We were treated equally.
There was a small problem in that not many girls were very good
at sharpening their drawing pens and
so you had to talk nicely to one of the men
to sharpen your drawing pen.
I could never do mine, I always had to rely on somebody else
because it was, at that time, it was more of a man's technical thing.
Once Marilyn's pen was properly sharpened,
she loved some of the symbols she had to draw.
They included bus stations,
churches, wind pumps
and Marilyn's favourite - rubbish dumps.
You would start with little tiny boulders
and you would draw the bigger boulders at the top
and then it would go down to give the impression
of a heap of rubbish, or refuse.
Did I get it right?
Was it the little ones at the top, or the big ones?
No, the big ones at the top... Yeah.
..becoming little dots towards the bottom. Yeah.
The draughtsmen and women who sweated over every last rock
of the rubbish dump were the unsung heroes of the OS map.
Their handiwork went uncredited,
so they found ways of leaving their mark.
The draughtsman, for all the work he's done,
never got his name on his pieces of work. We all did, of course.
We were quite ingenious at finding ways of signing the thing
and concealing it in the detail
but anybody who knows where to look
will find a lot of the draughtsmen's names in there.
On a cliff face was a great camouflage.
Such mischief on the map was normally spotted.
The survey's military attention to detail meant that there
was absolutely no room for error for the backroom men and women.
First of all, it was examined by your immediate supervisor.
It was then examined by his senior
and then it left and went to a section
which was devoted entirely to examining things.
That's what these guys did and they were all military people.
They examined everybody's maps and tore them to shreds
and then you were called over to put everything right.
It was very strict in those days, you were called by your surname
and there was no walking around in shirt sleeves.
It was that sort of environment.
You had old, um, almost Edwardian type
schoolmaster figures who ran the sections
and it just felt like being at school again sometimes.
This highly-disciplined working environment is
entirely in keeping with the origins of the Ordnance Survey,
which date back to the 1790s and the threat of Napoleonic invasion.
The Board of Ordnance was tasked with drawing up accurate maps
of the south coast of England to defend the nation.
Based in the Tower of London,
the Board of Ordnance looked after artillery, transport and supplies.
To complete the mapping,
the Board turned to cutting-edge technology
and the most precise piece of measuring equipment the world
had ever known -
the theodolite.
This is a five-inch theodolite
and the five-inch
refers to the size of these scales.
This is the vertical scale,
runs around here
and inside the base is the horizontal scale.
Both scales are calibrated in degrees, minutes and seconds
and can be read through these very fine microscopes here.
It has levelling bubbles to get the instrument precisely level,
to ensure accuracy when reading the angles again and again.
After the surveyors had measured the distance between
two points on the ground,
a theodolite was used to calculate
the angles to a third point.
Using the laws of geometry,
the distances to each point
were then calculated.
These are really skilled operators.
Even the booking of the readings you're given
has to all be done by hand
and all the calculations afterwards done by hand
using log tables and the like.
Yes, a lot of skill required.
In charge of the mapping of Kent was William Mudge.
Between 1798 and 1820,
he was the Ordnance Survey's first superintendent.
He's a brilliant figure
because he's both an administrator,
a kind of good politician,
but he's also a practical surveyor.
He's a real sort of child of the Enlightenment -
he gets the idea that you need to believe
in the idea of rational, mathematical thinking
to create objective maps.
Mudge's ground-breaking map of Kent,
on a scale of one inch to the mile,
was published in January 1801.
He's the figure who sort of really establishes the Ordnance Survey
as a long-term rolling project
which is given validation by the state
and also begins to have a wider popular, public impact.
So Mudge, I think, is the great hero, really, of the early days of the Ordnance Survey.
From this southern starting point,
Mudge's successor Major General Thomas Colby mapped his way
further up England and Wales between 1820 and 1847.
Colby was extremely eccentric, very, very energetic.
A complete workaholic, really.
He only had one hand, which was a huge hindrance for a surveyor,
and that had happened on an earlier training exercise where
he had been shown a pair of pistols which had then gone off in his hand.
He had to manage this incredibly delicate surveying equipment
with only one hand to do so.
Under his guardianship,
the Ordnance Survey finished publishing the first series of maps.
That series was officially finished in 1873
with the last map published of the Isle of Man.
The mapping of Britain, inch by painstaking inch,
took over 70 years.
Given the technology of the time, this was a colossal achievement.
Each map was the equivalent of two days' average wages,
putting them out of reach for most citizens.
But in time, the OS did come to realise the possibilities
for a more widespread usage of its maps among civilians.
By the turn of the 20th century,
the Ordnance Survey had mapped the whole of the British Isles
but with its hefty price tag, the print run of each map
remained very limited, with never more than 1,000 prints.
They weren't straightforward to get hold of around 1900.
You could get them through booksellers
and the booksellers then had to get them through
a central agent in London
who got them from Ordnance Survey themselves.
The British landscape had changed by the early 1900s.
The age of the motor car had opened up the country like never before.
Commercial map-makers spotted a gap in the market for the new traveller.
None more so than the Edinburgh company Bartholomew.
This canny Scottish firm started issuing half-inch maps entirely
based on OS one-inch maps entitled simply Reduced Ordnance Survey Map.
Bartholomew's took the OS map, added more attractive colours,
and they were soon flying off the shelves.
This shameless plagiarism didn't go down well with
the gentlemen of the Ordnance Survey.
It was suddenly realised that there was quite a bit of money
to be made out of copyright
and that is when rumblings began
from the Ordnance Survey in Bartholomew's direction.
John Bartholomew complained mightily,
called the whole thing ungentlemanly,
and had to change the title of his half-inch series
from Reduced Ordnance Map to just Reduced Map,
and you can see the change on this in the covers.
The 1911 Copyright Act enabled the Ordnance Survey to control
the reproduction of its maps by others much more effectively.
From this time on,
the words Crown Copyright Reserved were included on all its maps.
With this new commercial confidence came a new director-general.
Charles Close was determined to transform the Ordnance Survey
into a modern, popular mapping company.
He thought that Ordnance Survey mapping could be rationalised,
more particularly the small-scale mapping -
they could be greatly improved in appearance.
Close, like all heads of the Ordnance Survey up to 1977,
was a soldier, a Royal Engineer, and he wanted to improve the mapping
also from the point of view of military functionality.
The outbreak of World War I
disrupted Close's big plans for updating the covers.
But it allowed him to put the maps to vital military use.
The significance of the Ordnance Survey
was that it provided a nucleus of trained military
and civil manpower
who could be used both for surveys and for drawing and printing maps.
The OS planned to produce the maps at Southampton
and then ship them to France.
It becomes apparent that more sophisticated warfare
which has developed elsewhere is going to happen here,
with invisible firing, not from guns, of a dug-in enemy,
and therefore you need to survey in where they are.
The OS experts devised ingenious methods of surveying enemy lines...
..one of which was from the air.
Captain Harold Winterbottom was put in charge of the aerial division.
He was tasked with spotting
and photographing German artillery positions.
On the ground, observers had his plane firmly in sight.
At the moment when the target's position was received,
the telescope would be clamped and the bearing read off.
Winterbottom's strike rate was so phenomenally accurate
that British artillery troops called him The Astrologer.
When the war finally ended on November 11, 1918,
the Ordnance Survey had produced an astonishing 33 million maps
and diagrams for the British Army.
Quite a lot of this would involve getting as close to enemy lines
as possible, and even though they were wearing tin hats,
they would still be likely to be shot at.
67 men and women lost their lives
serving the Ordnance Survey during the conflict.
With the end of the war, Charles Close returned
to his plans for the modernisation of the Ordnance Survey...
..convinced that to survive it needed to generate
an income from its sales.
Prewar, the Survey's rivals made a small fortune with tourist maps,
cheekily using Ordnance Survey data.
Now, Charles close wanted a piece of this lucrative market.
In 1919, he launched a new set of one-inch tourist maps
aimed squarely at the holiday-maker.
The OS was quite deliberately going down-market.
The die-hard colonels and brigadier generals must have thought it
was hideously mimsy and pandering to horrible taste,
but they had to make some money, and that was a way of doing it.
Before the First World War, OS maps were drab, utilitarian objects.
So, to make them more appealing, Close decided to employ
the Survey's first-ever professional artist, Ellis Martin.
Gone were the old buff covers, gone were the old paper covers,
and in their place were introduced a series of pictorial covers,
which revolutionised the whole map marketing area for Ordnance Survey.
Ellis Martin's covers were painterly and picturesque.
They featured people, too,
the types who might buy the maps - pipe-smoking ramblers, cyclists,
and motorists.
Within two years of Ellis Martin joining,
map sales had gone through the roof.
In 1921, the OS recorded the highest-ever map sales.
Profits were up by 56% and Charles Close put this down
to the quality of Martin's cover designs.
While Ellis Martin worked for the Ordnance Survey between the two
world wars, he reigned supreme.
Nobody else matched him as a map cover designer.
Martin's artistic rebranding cleverly coincided
with the zeitgeist of the '20s and '30s.
This was an era which saw increased leisure time
for the lower middle classes.
It turned the stylish OS map into a must-have travel accessory.
VOICEOVER: We are now at the top of Leith Hill,
one of Surrey's most famous beauty spots.
As for maps, you can't beat the Ordnance Survey.
Absolutely reliable, they show all those off-the-highway haunts
the true rambler loves to explore.
The relationship between the accuracy of the Ordnance Survey maps
with the possibilities it allows you of exploring the landscape
plus the heightened nationalism in the interwar period
has really cemented that idea of the Ordnance Survey maps
as an icon of patriotic Englishness.
Since feet are very much in evidence,
footwear is another important consideration,
so choose your boot to suit your route.
Many people's favourite series of OS maps,
known as the Popular Edition, is from this era,
published between 1919 and 1926.
That era spans a part of history in Britain where the number
of motor cars on the road went up from 77,000 to around one million.
And so that map is the last picture we have of Britain
before it was overrun by motor transport.
I am looking at a Britain that no longer exists -
it's a Britain before motorways,
before airports, or at least before many of them.
But it's a Britain before traffic jams.
It's a quiet, a very peaceful Britain.
The Ordnance Survey's maps are an irreplaceable record
of historical change.
Because the OS has been mapping Britain for so long,
you can compare the same place through different ages,
so you get these spot checks of development
through many, many different eras.
In that respect, they are a completely invaluable,
unique resource.
As well as charting historical change,
some OS maps are also highly sought-after.
Certain covers have become very collectable.
There was one map produced in 1927
for the eclipse of the sun.
This map was valid for only one day, but it showed
the path of the sun's eclipse across the country on that day in 1927.
That is quite a collectable map.
There's always been something about Ordnance Survey maps that appeals
to the Great British compulsive, of the outdoor and armchair variety.
These are very collectable items,
something which one can put in a house,
don't take up too much room, and on the whole are a lot cheaper
than a very fine piece of antique furniture.
It is the fellows that generally collect the maps.
Men are completists.
We have that bit of our brain that wants the full collection,
and it doesn't matter whether it's Bob Dylan albums
or stars' autographs, we have to have the full collection.
OS maps are just the same.
Of course, you have a finite number, you have the 204 Landrangers of
the whole country, and for a fellow, the ambition is to get them all.
31-year-old Ed Fielden has been collecting OS maps
for over 12 years now.
I think I probably am a map addict.
It's one of those addictions that I don't think anyone can help.
It's perfectly harmless.
In fact, it's an enriching addiction.
So, I've just moved house
and this is probably the first room I got going properly -
this is what I'm calling my map room, if you like.
There's somewhere in the region of 3,000 maps just in this room,
and a few hundred others in boxes still to be sorted through.
I would probably say that I have spent over £10,000 so far,
collecting all these maps.
But it's money well spent.
The thing I probably like most about Ordnance Survey maps
is their clean lines, their... You know, you feel a sense of accuracy
when you look at a map made by Ordnance Survey.
There's quite a joy in seeing a paper landscape, if you will,
and interpreting that into how it would look on the ground,
and then when you go out with the map,
you see that landscape come to life, in effect.
You see all the bumps and the hills and the various roads
and streams and rivers and all of that, it comes to life.
Most Ordnance Survey maps include a symbol of a small blue triangle
with a dot inside.
This marks a triangulation point.
For map addicts like Ed, these are places of pilgrimage.
I've visited somewhere in the region of 300 trig points so far.
Each time I visit a trig point, I take a little photograph of it,
and I log my visit and make a note of the date and time,
and say when I visited.
I've got about 6,200 pillars to visit yet,
and I think it's going to take me a few years to do it.
The thousands of trig points which cover the length
and breadth of the country were built between 1935 and 1962.
This was one of the hardest and most important projects
undertaken by the Ordnance Survey in the whole of the 20th century.
The original 19th century measurements were out of date
and needed to be revised.
To do this, the OS devised a new metric grid system
which split the country up into squared sections.
Each grid would receive their own map at a new, more detailed scale
of 1:25,000, the equivalent of 2.5 inches to the mile.
In charge of this vast project was Brigadier Martin Hotine.
A veteran of World War I, he was a stickler for accuracy.
His simple idea was to build an extensive system of four foot
concrete observation points across the UK
from which new measurements could be taken.
They were built by members of the Ordnance Survey,
taking sand and cement and plywood formers
to build these things at all of these high points.
They had to make this concrete construction
on top of all of these mountains.
They had very deep foundations, which is one of the reasons
they're all still on mountain tops to this day.
They were built to last.
The OS employed the same principles it had used for their initial
mapping of the country in the 1800s.
VOICEOVER: Theodolites are used to line up the tripods which carry
the measuring tapes.
Microscope readings are taken every 24 metres
until the whole ten-mile baseline is complete.
From this baseline, the OS built up a network of points
which provided a template for the highly precise remapping of Britain.
The most effective way to make accurate measurements
from the new system of trig points
was in the middle of the night, using powerful torch lights.
The surveyors sometimes had to wait days for a clear night to appear.
But the project was disrupted by the outbreak of World War II,
and was not completed until 17 years after the war ended.
Working on its completion was Dave Broadley's first job
when he joined the Ordnance Survey in 1957.
They'd progressed through the country,
and the Outer Hebrides and the north of Scotland
was the last bit to be done.
You would have to carry, as well as the theodolite,
which we called a fiddle because it was fiddly...
And they were heavy. We also had a lamp,
which was a miniature searchlight,
and a six-volt car battery
up a mountain, right?
Which was heavy.
And then you'd have to have maybe a tripod as well to stand it on.
We had to do the readings many, many times.
Measuring flatter areas of England such as East Anglia
was not any easier.
With no convenient hills available,
the surveyors had to erect enormous and rather flimsy steel structures.
They were called Bilby Towers.
On the outside was like a stepladder, and you used to climb up there
and, if you were on your own,
you had to climb up with a six-volt battery in one hand, in a carrier,
and do it like this.
All the way to the top. 103 foot.
We had no health and safety, no helmets.
We used to wear wellingtons so you could put your spanners in.
It was like the Wild West.
We felt like pioneers.
It was an adventure.
I felt privileged to be doing it.
Sorry.
Mmm.
When the re-triangulation project was finally completed,
the mass of new geographical information was used
to make more accurate, up-to-date maps.
VOICEOVER: This printing machine, which was made in Leeds,
will print 5,000 spot-on Ordnance Survey maps an hour.
This colourful world in miniature and minute detail.
By the late 1960s, Britain was being re-forged in the white heat
of a technological and scientific revolution.
The Ordnance Survey was not immune
from big changes to the way it operated.
Machines were beginning to take away many aspects
of the draughtsman's job.
As far back as the late 1940s,
the OS had been using aerial surveys to update its maps.
But the adoption of the stereo plotting machine
had made this much easier.
This machine allowed cartographers to plot the contours
and elevations of mountainous areas using aerial photos to create maps
far quicker than even the speediest draughtsman.
Stereo plotting has made mountains into molehills
as far as the hard grind of map-making is concerned.
Here's how they get those squiggles
which show you the height of mountains.
Draughtsmen trace the lines the stereo plotter's made
on wax-coated glass, a process known as "scribing a mould".
Climbing these hills would be much less work
than drawing them so accurately.
Although scribing mould was a step forward from hand drawing maps,
this process still demanded a lot of time
and effort from the draughtsperson.
We used basic tools, but they would have different cutters in them
at different widths.
Tools that we use, this one for drawing straight lines with.
It scribes the line on the plastic.
And there's a tripod for doing curvy lines.
You move down and scratch the coating off,
using that to move it round.
Those were the two basic tools.
And what we call a dot cutter.
So basically we line it up and we need the dot.
And just drill a hole.
Hopefully not right through it.
To do an Outdoor Leisure map, one side of an Outdoor Leisure map
took two years.
Despite the incredible attention to detail
of the Ordnance Survey's cartographers, historically,
some areas of the country have always been off limits.
Most famously, I guess, with Ordnance Survey, was from the '20s
right the way through until very recently, they had a policy
of keeping off the map - this was government policy -
keeping off the map sites of military sensitivity.
During the Cold War, Britain's security was thought
to be under grave threat from the Soviet Union...
..and nearly 5,000 sensitive areas were excluded from OS maps.
There were some really crazy ones. When I was a kid in the '70s
we used to go and stay in Scarborough every year,
up in North Yorkshire. And a favourite day trip was to go out
and look at the golf balls on the North Yorkshire Moors
of the Fylingdales early warning system. You could get
a coach trip there, you could buy postcards of the place.
But there was just a blank, nothing on the Ordnance Survey map.
I mean, who did they think they were kidding?
Certainly not the Russians, anyway.
After the fall of the Iron Curtain in the late 1980s,
some surprisingly detailed Soviet maps of 92 British towns and cities
came to light.
Ironically, they featured in glorious detail
all the military sites which the OS had been forced to omit...
..and much more on top.
And it's things that we don't normally see on maps.
It's things like the speed of flow of rivers
and whether a river is tidal or not.
It's things like the width of roads
and the clearance of the carriageways
and how many carriageways and what the surface of a road is made of.
It's things like the depth to which a channel has been
dredged for clearance.
They've collected as much information as they could possibly find
and put it on a map.
These maps are still top-secret in Russia.
It is assumed they were completed using a mixture of existing maps
of the UK, spies on the ground and photography from above.
If you're going to invade, they are very much useful
if somehow this is now your territory.
Then there is what you need
to rule the place, or to run the place.
Clearly they were most interested in objects of military importance,
and a particularly good example is the Chatham Dockyard in Kent,
where British submarines were being built
throughout the Cold War period.
And on the Ordnance Survey maps, that whole area is shown as
an empty blank space.
Whereas what we have here is the Soviet map from 1985.
We can see each of the military buildings identified
and also the individual railway lines,
the docks and the dry docks.
And what's interesting, of course, is the contemporary Ordnance map
has none of that information.
In fact, attention was drawn to it
by the fact it was a blank space.
It was easier to find secret sites by looking for the blank spaces
on the Ordnance maps!
The Soviet cartographers who mapped the UK's major cities
during the '60s and '70s would have been helped greatly
by the use of satellite imagery.
Technology at this time was developing rapidly
and the Ordnance Survey were early adopters of the computer.
I remember the staff being...
Certain staff members were thought to have an aptitude
for computer logistics.
..being tested.
And there was a very primitive computer brought in,
and our fastest draughtsman was ranged against
this computer to see who was going to finish the map first.
And obviously, not a huge map,
but a number of key skills and tricks, what have you.
And I think it more or less came out 50/50, you know.
But man didn't stay level with machine for very long.
By the early 1970s, a revolutionary shift towards
digital map-making was underway.
The OS's huge archive of topographical data
was digitised onto spools of magnetic tape.
These computers were much more efficient than humans.
This unit is capable of plotting a map at up to 40 inches a second.
A skilled draughtsman might take days to do a sheet like this.
This machine will finish it off in minutes.
The first computer-generated map came just two years before
another big shift for the Survey -
moving from the imperial to the metric era.
The old one-inch map was replaced by the 1:50,000 scale.
These maps became known as the Landranger series.
For hardcore OS fans, they quickly gained iconic status.
The northern part of the country came out in 1976.
And at nine o'clock in the morning on the day they came out,
I was through the doors of WH Smith's in Kidderminster,
and there they were! It was kind of, I guess, the Harry Potter launch
of its day as far as I was concerned. But I was the only one
in the queue, as you can probably imagine.
During the '70s, the Ordnance Survey was encouraged by the government
to become a little more... Well, relaxed.
In 1974, it announced that the director-general
no longer needed to have a military background.
Yet again, the Ordnance Survey was adapting to meet
the demands of a new Britain.
Surveying methods had changed beyond all recognition.
Infrared beams were now used to measure distances.
But sometimes, nature had other ideas.
OS 12 to OS 13, will you move to the corner of the barn, please?
'I think you'll have to shoo the cattle out of the way, over.'
OK, Rog, wilco.
CATTLE MOO
The OS digitised the last of its 230,000 different maps
in 1995, making Britain the first country in the world
to complete a programme of large-scale electronic mapping.
It saw that its future lay squarely in this direction.
In 2001, a new computer system was introduced -
the OS MasterMap.
It's now the biggest geographical database in the entire world,
containing over 440 million man-made and natural landscape features
of the British Isles.
This huge geographical archive is a valuable commodity
for the OS and it absorbs new data at a phenomenal rate,
with up to 10,000 changes being made to it in a day.
One of the ways the MasterMap reacts to the smallest
change in the physical fabric of the nation
is through its all-seeing digital eye in the sky.
My job is, basically, to cover 80,000 kilometres per year
of Great Britain...
..and hopefully accumulate 50,000 photos in that time.
CAMERA SHUTTER CLICKS
This camera here is a 196-megapixel camera,
so it's a pretty decent resolution there,
much better than what you've got on your iPhone 5.
We've got eight lenses underneath this camera here.
There's four colour.
Er, three panchromatic, so black and white,
and one infrared.
So we're getting a lot of data - they're all taking images
at the same time.
Once we go over the specific site, it automatically takes the images.
And then we can view them on this screen here, which allows us
to quality control them.
Being up in the sky for eight hours at a time, you get to see
a lot of land, you get to see some great features.
You also get to see some great infrastructure as well.
The freedom up here, really, it's brilliant.
These aerial photographs are compared against
the existing OS map.
Any changes are updated immediately on the MasterMap.
Over 90% of the Ordnance Survey's revenue stream
is now made up from selling its digital data.
But the OS are not the only people watching
and profiting from our every move.
In recent years, Google has been mapping its way around the world,
creating an instant-access, interactive picture of the planet.
I think the problems that the Ordnance Survey faces are twofold.
One is that you are in an age of globalisation,
so the concept of mapping the nation state is,
it seems to me, in a long period of decline.
The other problem, of course, is the decline of
the paper map.
Online, digital geospatial applications are now predominating,
so the OS is in a real problem.
It's now become absolutely ubiquitous to use online maps.
Most of us now access maps through sat navs or our phones.
And sales of those old favourites, the Landranger and Explorer maps,
have been gradually declining.
But there are no plans to abandon the traditional paper maps.
The experience of reading a physical map, making sense of its
funny-shaped symbols and contours are part of its pleasure,
and its sheer physical scale is hard to beat.
Big paper maps give you an idea of where you sit in a bigger landscape.
If you've got a narrow GPS map on your screen as you're driving,
all you see is a narrow strip of information.
If you've got an Ordnance Survey map, you see all of
the contextual material as well. You see exactly where you are sitting
in the landscape.
You can very clearly see, because the symbols differentiate
between a, you know, a coniferous wood and a deciduous wood.
And you can tell the difference between a wide river
and a narrow stream.
Despite the bigger picture Ordnance Survey offers,
digital maps have taken over our view of the world.
So much so, that some have warned we are losing the ancient art
of reading a map.
One group who has always placed value in the power
of map-reading is the Scouts.
As an organisation, they have always been one of the OS's biggest fans.
But can today's tech-savvy Scouts be convinced that traditional
map-reading skills and OS maps are still relevant?
I remember learning how to use Ordnance Survey maps myself
when I was in the Scouts,
and that's not a knowledge that ever goes away.
You learned because it was a skill you didn't learn anywhere else.
And, you know, six-figure references, compass work, maps,
was something new, it was something interesting,
something exciting. You remembered to know that if you looked
at an Ordnance Survey map, a red triangle meant you were near
a Youth Hostel.
For this group of teenagers, whose first instinct
to find a youth hostel would be a Google search,
they're learning traditional navigational skills.
So, if we are there, I would like you to figure out how long
it will take us to get to this point here.
Well, we also to use the compass to measure
how many contour lines there are, which determines the steepness
of the hills that we're going up.
So, there's one, two,
three, four, five and that determines the...
It's not quite clear how much the joy of old-school navigation techniques
beats more modern technology for these boys.
So, it should take us 20 minutes.
But one benefit is clear...
You don't require a signal for a map, whereas you do for a phone.
Plus phones run out of battery, so it doesn't really help if you're
out in the forest and you're...
Going to get stuck, aren't you?
Though, as we all know, the hardest thing about using an OS map
is folding it up.
We'll do creases in the middle. This is, like, the main one.
Sort of fold that in half, and then it sort of...
folds in on itself, doesn't it?
You have get it precise, get the creases in the right position,
match them together. It takes a lot.
Sometimes I've to get one of the leaders to do it!
Are you Succeeding? A little. Yeah, we're getting there.
Fold it back. Fold it back?
And then it just folds. I mean, that looks simple, but...
It's not that... ..it's not when you're on your own and...
It's taken a lot of practice.
Over the past 226 years, the Ordnance Survey has followed
every move our nation has made.
It's mapped the geography of our lives and helped us win wars.
And it's done so with a world-beating use
of new technology...
..and a rather eccentric spirit of adventure.
The Ordnance Survey is absolutely a Great British success story,
and it forms a model for many national mapping agencies
around the world.
Certainly, the Ordnance Survey makes Britain pretty much
the leading country in the world in terms of possessing
accurate geographical information about itself.
It's the greatest cartographic institution in the world
and it could not be more British.
Well, in some ways, the Ordnance Survey is
a perfect mirror of Britain,
at its best and at its worst.
I mean, at its best - you know, entrepreneurial
and go-getting and quietly ambitious for the country.
A beautiful fusion of art and science.
And then, it is as an organisation, and always has been,
rather stuffy, rather pompous, rather self-important.
Britain in a nutshell.
The gridlines and coordinates of the OS map have always been
a trusty travelling companion.
I cannot possibly imagine this country functioning without
Ordnance Survey maps.
Perhaps the greatest testament to the Ordnance Survey
is that for many of us, they don't just produce maps,
the OS ARE maps.
And the simple charm of their paper map can never be replaced.
Brian gets quite irate when people say,
"You don't need to tell us where you live, because we've got sat nav."
So Bryan says, "No, you should be using an Ordnance Survey map."
You can't beat an OS paper map.
The OS map will always be the best.