Zoom Meeting #19, 14th December 2022. 'Adding Railways to the Old Series.'

• Presenter: Dr. Rob Wheeler
• Format: Structured talk, followed by questions & answers
• View the recording here, streaming length: 1hr 12m

Throughout its life, the one-inch Old Series was regularly updated to show new railways. This talk looks at the practical aspects of this: what it meant for the surveyors and the engravers. It also looks at the attitude to what features adjacent to the railway should be revised at the same time, and how this changed over time.  

Zoom Meeting #18, 14th November 2022. 'The first 25 years of the Ordnance Survey coloured one-inch maps, 1897-1922: how the "Mudge Map" turned into the Landranger.'

• Presenter: Dr. Richard Oliver
• Format: Structured talk, followed by question & answer
• View the recording here, streaming length: 1hr 17m

The first Ordnance Survey maps, published over 200 years ago, differ in two important respects from those we are accustomed to today. Then they were all ‘single-colour’, .e. black; now they are multi-colour. Then they showed relief by hachures; now they show them by contour lines. This was a radical transition, which took place over about 25 years, from the late 1890s to the early 1920s. This talk describes how this came about, and includes slides of both some very well-known maps that are part of the story, such as the Killarney sheet of 1913, and some much more obscure ones. It was a gradual process, and although the effects were most obvious on the one-inch map, and on its descendent, the 1:50,000 Landranger, the actual transition involved some much less familiar maps. The term ‘coloured outline map’ is used, and although the OS were using it in 1919, it has not hitherto been used very much. Perhaps things will be different after this talk!    

Zoom Meeting #17, Monday 6 June 2022 "Look, they gave me a map"

• Presenter: Ian Byrne
• Format: A Show & Tell followed by question & answer
• View the recording here, streaming length: 2hr 15m

Not all maps were designed to be sold; some were given away for promotional reasons, by organisations as diverse as tourist boards, estate agents, bus companies, hotels, petrol stations and even tonic wine! Some were carefully designed to tempt the traveller to explore, while others look as if they were thrown together in 5 minutes. A few even used recognisable Ordnance Survey base mapping. At this Show & Tell invited CCS members to bring along some favourites, good and bad, with the only restriction being that the first owner was not required to pay for them. They could date from any time in the past 150 years as, unlike many commercial maps with a cover price, these still seem to be produced in large quantities.   

Zoom Meeting #16, Tuesday 12 April 2022 'The Military Editions of the 6-inch'

• Presenters: Dr. Rob Wheeler
• Format: A talk, followed by a Q&A session

At this meeting Rob gave a talk on The Military Editions of the 6-inch. His aim was to draw attention to the utility of these maps as a way of recovering features that had been deleted from the 25-inch on security grounds. Most of these editions had originated from military versions of the 2nd edition plates, which were subsequently revised by War Department surveyors independently of the normal OS revision process. This WD revision was limited to the WD estate and followed different standards from those of the OS. New features were depicted in a more generalised way; but the surveyors often added descriptive names which reflected their inside knowledge. The labelling of Position Finding Cells and the arrangements for fire control of coastal batteries were an example of this. The availability of a significant proportion of these sheets comes about because of reprints made in 1941-2 and subsequently offered to major repositories including the National Library of Scotland. Having been placed online a decade ago by NLS along with the sales editions of the English 6-inch, they can be found quite easily by using the 'filter by date' facility of the NLS's 'Map Finder' tool. 

IMAGE DETAIL ABOVE RIGHT: 1930 depictions of the Hillsea Ordnance Depot, Military edition on left, sales edition on right. Only the name of the depot was suppressed from the sales edition. The military edition is based on the previous (1907) general revision - note the pre-Grouping railway names. The railway connection had always been a key aspect of the depot, but the WD surveyor clearly regarded railway detail as lying outside his responsibilities. [Courtesy of the National Library of Scotland]   

Zoom meeting #15, 8 March 2022. 'Terrain Cartography'

• Presenters: David Watt (CCS) and Paul Naylor (BCS and OS)
• Format: An online talk jointly by The Charles Close Society and The British Cartographics Society
• View the recording here, streaming length: 1hr 24m

This was a joint talk with BCS, entitled Terrain Cartography, with CCS member Dave Watt and Paul Naylor from BCS & OS. The two excellent speakers discussed the mapping of terrain and how the visualisation and techniques used to depict it have changed over time. There followed a Q&A session after the two speakers’ talks.