Map Addict

The first survey of Scotland, between 1747 and 1752, was of the troublesome Highlands, when Roy was teamed up with the young Paul Sandby (1731-1809). Sandby, who later became one of the age’s most celebrated landscape painters and a founder member of the Royal Academy, provided the artistic talent for the beautiful maps that they produced, complementing Roy, the technical wizard who worried perpetually about getting the topographical detail correct. Once the Highlands had been comprehensively mapped, it was decided to survey and plot southern Scotland, but Sandby had returned to England by then and the resultant maps were nowhere near as spectacular as the earlier ones of the far north. Roy was a perfectionist, and the lack of precise measuring equipment frustrated him enormously; late in life, he wrote about these early map-making efforts in Scotland, describing them as ‘rather a magnificent military sketch, than a very accurate map of a country’.

From Scotland, Roy enlisted in the army and served with distinction in the Seven Years’ War with France. Once again, his map-making skills, and perfectionism, were usefully employed in his work as a special adviser on troop deployment and strategy. Roy’s reports on such matters included beautifully drawn maps that he always insisted on doing himself, the army draughtsmen and his subordinate officers just not being up to his exacting standards. This lack of trust in anyone else became a growing theme as his career moved towards its apogee.

On his return, he settled in London, and continued rising through the ranks of the army, while spending more and more time on his cartographic pursuits. Central to his ambition was finding the right equipment, or rather, having the right equipment created for his needs. Much of his time was spent experimenting with measuring instruments in order to see how they could be employed to produce the greatest possible accuracy. They were never quite good enough. Nonetheless, his military experiences abroad, and his knowledge of how far advanced the Dutch and French were in such matters, had convinced him that the time was ripe for a comprehensive national survey, and he first approached the authorities about the matter in 1763. With a canny knack for telling the government what he most thought they would respond to, he emphasised Britain’s vulnerability to invasion, particularly along the south coast, and the importance of conducting such a survey ‘during times of peace and tranquillity’, rather than waiting to do it under the chaotic cloud of war. They turned him down on grounds of expense. He re-presented his plans three years later, only to have them refused once again.

Impatient but undeterred, William Roy used every moment of his spare time to conduct his own informal triangulation experiments around London, establishing the position and distance of landmarks in the capital in relation to the Royal Observatory at Greenwich. Triangulation remained the bedrock of map-making until it was supplanted, less than thirty years ago, by satellite Global Positioning Systems (GPS) technology. The principle of triangulation is that if you know the length of one line of a triangle, and two of its angles to the other lines, the entire triangle can accurately be plotted for both distance and elevation. It’s an extremely time-consuming business, depending as it does on caddying heavy equipment up to the highest vantage points: the first triangulation of Britain and Ireland, started by William Roy in 1783, took nearly seventy years to complete.

Roy regularly presented his London triangulation findings to the Royal Society, so that when the inflammatory missive came from Paris in 1783, he seemed the obvious man to restore Britain’s dented honour by conducting the experiment. He was extremely well prepared, for he had used every one of his travels, both at home and abroad, to map the landscape and establish the most suitable places for triangulation. The flat expanse of Hounslow Heath, to the west of London, had long been selected as his preferred choice for the perfect base line. And although the project was nominally to establish only the precise relation of the London and Paris observatories, Roy knew well that it could, and should, be the harbinger of something far greater; that it could ‘extend different serieses [sic] of Triangles…in all directions to the remotest part of the Island’.

William Roy is an undoubted hero to any British map addict, but he is also something of a siren warning to us all. The brilliant young adventurer turned inexorably into a grumpy old man, for whom no one, and nothing, was ever quite good enough. Sounds familiar? I rather fear so. So fixated did he become by his great triangulation project that he picked fights with anyone who failed to come up to his exacting standards, most spectacularly in the case of instrument-maker Jesse Ramsden (1735-1800). Ramsden was just as much of a perfectionist as Roy, and with just as great a cause: his scientific and astronomical instruments attracted customers from across the world to his Piccadilly workshop. Roy’s greatest frustration throughout his map-making career was the fact that the measuring instruments available couldn’t cope with the precision that he demanded. For the great triangulation project of south-east England, Roy commissioned Ramsden to design and build the most exact theodolite ever seen.

Unfortunately, Ramsden failed to employ enough workmen on the project and thus to produce the goods soon enough for Roy, and the cartographer began to cast increasingly bellicose aspersions on the instrument-maker’s professional ability. The massive theodolite—it weighed over fourteen stone and had to be hauled around on a specially designed truck—was the finest ever created, but, to Roy’s continuing chagrin, it was still prone to some tiny errors and, most annoyingly, took a whole three years to build. In fairness to Roy, he was sixty years old and in failing health, so must have felt the continued delays with increasing impatience, urgently wanting to finish the project while he still could. That doesn’t excuse his behaviour, however, as he repeatedly complained about Ramsden to the Royal Society in letters and papers that became ever more dyspeptic. Ramsden, also a Fellow of the Society, responded in kind, so that members found themselves piggies-in-the-middle as complaints and counter-complaints between the two men resounded throughout the Society’s hallowed halls. Roy charged Ramsden with being ‘remiss and dilatory’ and ‘very negligent’; Ramsden whined back that ‘nothing could equal my surprise on hearing the charges brought against me by Major-General Roy…I was the more affected by it as coming from a Gentleman with whom I considered myself in Friendship’. This spat reached its climax in May 1790, when Ramsden demanded that the Royal Society expunge some of Roy’s more colourful slaggings of him from their records. Sadly, William Roy died a few weeks later, the matter still unresolved. It was an acrimonious—and, to us, salutary—end to a brilliant career.

Although William Roy died before the official foundation of the Ordnance Survey in 1791, he was its undoubted progenitor. The event that gave formal birth to the organisation was the re-measuring of the Hounslow Heath base line that Roy himself had first established some seven years earlier. In April 1784, following the French submission to George III, Roy had swiftly secured government backing for the survey and wasted no time in getting on with it. He had at his command twelve Army NCOs and an entire division of the 12th Foot Brigade from nearby Windsor; these he set to levelling and clearing the five-mile-plus route of his line. Having a burly crew of soldiers around was also good insurance; Hounslow Heath in the eighteenth century was the most dangerous location in Britain, and certainly not a place for gentlemen to linger. London and Bath were the two wealthiest cities in Georgian England, and the busy road connecting them ran (as it does still) along the heath’s northern edge. The lowlying ground, with its unexpected fogs, suppurating ditches and numerous copses, was the ideal hiding place for highwaymen and cutpurses, who had rich pickings among the well-to-do on their way to Windsor or the West Country. Contemporary maps show a string of gibbets along the Bath Road across the heath. Many of these would have contained rotting corpses swinging in the breeze, for the policy of the authorities was to return the bodies of those hanged at Tyburn to the place of their misdemeanours, to be displayed to all as a shocking deterrent.

Jesse Ramsden—still, at this point, in Roy’s good books—had made a steel chain exactly one hundred feet in length, together with wooden rods of twenty feet apiece: both were used alternately to calibrate the distance as the party progressed slowly from King’s Arbour Field and across the heath, with the distant witch’s hat spire of Banstead church as their guidance point on the horizon. Work progressed through a monumentally wet summer, conditions that didn’t suit the wooden rods, which were found to expand and contract way too much for accurate measurement. The project ground to a brief halt. Glass rods were commissioned and produced, which required the utmost delicacy as they were hauled across the heath, particularly when it came to crossing the busy Staines Road.

Delays occurred too because the surveying team became something of an unlikely attraction, especially after King George III dropped by on 19 July to see how the work was going: unfortunately, so torrential was the rain that Roy was unable to demonstrate much of their work. The King returned on 21 August and spent two hours examining the team’s work and discussing it with them. This, according to Roy, ‘met with his gracious approbation’. In his wake, all manner of society notables trotted by to see what was going on, and it was left to Sir Joseph Banks, the President of the Royal Society, to erect mobile refreshment and hospitality tents in order to cope with the crowds and to keep them at a discreet distance from the work of the surveyors. The team finally reached their destination, the workhouse at Hampton, on the penultimate day of August. By now, the steel chain had been abandoned and the entire measurement had been made using the glass rods. The base line, announced William Roy, was 27,404.72 feet: just over 5.19 miles long. ‘There never has been,’ he declaimed, ‘so great a proportion of the surface of the Earth measured with so much care and accuracy.’

Three years later, when Ramsden’s theodolite was finally ready, the survey continued, using triangulation to work its way from Hampton down to Dover and the English Channel. The supposed aim of establishing the precise relation of the London and Paris observatories was never quite attained, but the process had, in Roy’s eyes, been hugely successful in his main ambition of showing how poor and imprecise current British maps were and how a national survey was both urgently desirable and eminently practicable. In his final report to the Royal Society and the King in 1789, Roy egged them all on:

The trigonometrical operation, so successfully begun, should certainly be continued, and gradually extended over the whole Island. Compared with the greateness of the object, the annual expence to the publick would be a mere trifle not worthy of being mentioned. The honour of the Nation is concerned in having at least as good a map of This as there is of any Other country.

Such as France, Your Majesty, he might have added. It took less than a year for the authorities to agree and to find the money, but, by then, Roy was dead.

The fogs, footpads and gibbets may be long gone from Hounslow Heath, but the land still has a melancholy tang to it, if only thanks to the fact that so much of it has been eaten alive by Heathrow Airport, located there for precisely the same reasons (vast expanse, flat as a pancake, near London) as Roy’s base line. The airport has swallowed whole villages along the northern part of the line, its route south-east has been filled in with shops, factories, houses, roads and all the normal suburban detritus of the outskirts of London. The line, dotted across field and factory, and marked portentously as General Roy’s Base, used to appear on OS maps up until the early twentieth century, though not since. Strangely, the northern end of it at Heathrow is labelled, on the current OS 1:25 000 Explorer map, with the supremely wordy ‘Cannon: West End of General Roy’s Base (site of)’; although the cannon is firmly there in precisely the spot indicated, there is nothing ‘site of’ about it. The other end, at Hampton—which is far easier, and more pleasurable, to find—doesn’t even warrant that, and goes completely unmarked.

Trying to trace the line today, I was reminded of the late Linda Smith’s immortal observation that Greater London was something of a misnomer, for ‘the further you get away from the middle of it, London doesn’t really get greater—it’s more Lesser London’. She came from Erith (‘not so much the city that never sleeps, more the town that lies awake all night staring at the ceiling’), which sits crusted on the rim of the capital in much the same way as Feltham, Bedfont and Hanworth, the sprawls that now cover William Roy’s historic line. There are other invisible lines to contend with here: these undistinguished, indistinguishable towns are firmly on the other side of the tracks from leafy Hampton (as in Court), where Roy’s measurement ended. This lies in that weird little south-western corner of Greater London, the Twickenham-Richmond triangle: smug and tweaked, embarrassed Tory so voting LibDem, death by bungalow and leylandii.

After Major-General Roy conducted his experiments, wooden posts were interred in the ground at either end of the recorded base line as a memorial. In 1791, eleven months after Roy’s death, the party led by the Duke of Richmond, charged with re-measuring the line for the Board of Ordnance, found that the posts were rotting and so they were replaced by upended cannons. There, wondrously, they still remain. Both cannons have seen untold change unfold around them over two centuries. The southern one, at Hampton, witnessed the demolition of the borough workhouse nearby; it thence lived in an area of open ground known as Cannon Field until Twickenham Borough Council built housing estates on it in the late 1940s. At least they left the cannon intact and had the good grace to name the two nearest culde-sacs Roy Grove (where the cannon can be found sat in a grassy gap between two post-war semis) and Cannon Close (which, indeed, it is). This is Hampton as the acme of suburbia, so much so that the street opposite is Acacia Road.

Handily, there’s a bus—the 285 Kingston-on-Thames to Heathrow—that almost precisely connects the two cannons, taking a route that’s only a little over a mile longer than William Roy’s 5.19-mile straight line. The good general wouldn’t recognise it these days. The bus coughs its way up the Uxbridge Road and into Feltham, doing a quick detour into the Sainsbury’s car park, and passing forlorn-looking light industrial estates, the Clipper Cutz hair salon, the Chirpy Chaps barbers, Cindy’s Nail Bar, Fryday’s chippy, a Subway or two, the A3 roundabout and parades of Metroland semis displaying either a St George’s flag or a ‘No To Heathrow Expansion’ sticker, sometimes both (albeit quite hard to see through the triple glazing).

I broke my journey at Feltham, in order to take a look at another oblique memorial to William Roy, an eponymous modern pub off the High Street. This, it claims, is named after him because of its position more or less halfway along his historic line, although it’s stretching things slightly, as the General Roy pub is nearly a mile to the south of the route. There’s nothing there to indicate its homage to Roy, save for one old map of the district on the wall, showing the Feltham area as a bucolic cluster of villages, before they were entirely obliterated by the spreading gut of the capital and its main airport. The pub is pitched at workers from the nearby industrial park, home to something glassy and chromey called the Feltham Corporate Centre—a name to strike even greater terror into the loins than the town’s rather better-known Young Offenders’ Institution.

From Feltham, the 285 fairly closely follows the route of the base line north-west towards Hatton Cross and Heathrow. Even without the growing taste of diesel in the air and the ear-splitting screams of the jets overhead, you’d know that there’s a major airport coming up. It dominates everything, especially when the tired, tatty—and increasingly impossible to sell—houses finally give way to the dispiriting landscape of international aviation: the pavement-less roads clogged with traffic, the giant hangars, mysterious metal buildings housing anything from security firms to haulage companies, car parks galore, miles of razor wire, CCTV whirring and winking in every direction and a collection of hotels that no one, surely, has ever spent a second night in.

Heathrow Airport only came into existence thanks to government sleight-of-hand at the end of the Second World War. The site, on the richest agricultural land in the country, was commandeered under Emergency Powers in 1943, purportedly for the RAF. It was never used as such. The then Under-Secretary of State for Air, Harold Balfour, revealed in his autobiography that the requisition and construction work undertaken were entirely bogus, and that the plans had always been to turn the airfield into London’s principal civil airport come the end of hostilities. Playing the national emergency card simply allowed the authorities to circumvent any normal planning procedures—and so the pattern continues.

Even Major-General William Roy fell foul of the airport zealots’ economy with the truth. When the never-to-be-used RAF base was being built in 1944, the memorial cannon that marked the north-western end of his base line was removed, in a theatrical attempt to demonstrate that no impediment—even one just five feet tall—should be placed in the way of our magnificent men in their flying machines. Sense eventually prevailed, and the cannon was returned in 1968, and finally replaced in its original position four years later, where it still squats. It’s not easy to locate: indeed, the irony is that you need a bloody good map to find it. Tucked away in a grassy corner nibbled out of a long-stay car park, the cannon sits alone and unloved, overlooking the airport’s main police station and the northern perimeter fence. You’d hardly notice it, especially compared with the huge banner that hangs off the car park fence above it: ‘Exclusive Parking: Park Today. Complimentary 15 Minute Spa Treatment’—well, who wouldn’t want a rub down from a car park attendant? In Paris, you suspect that a monument this significant would have been turned into a vast pyramid, visited by coachloads of schoolchildren by day and extravagantly flood-lit by night.

I paused, gulped down a little more airborne diesel, and felt strangely proud of the British way.

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