The light is thin today, the kind of grey that makes the edges of the flats across the street look like they were sketched in charcoal and then partially rubbed out. I have been staring at a fold-out Ordnance Survey map of the Peak District spread across my kitchen table. It is a beautiful, technical thing, but there is something aggressive about its precision. Every contour line and spot height feels like a command rather than a description. It makes sense when you remember these maps started with the Board of Ordnance. They were military tools, designed for moving batteries and measuring terrain for conquest. It is a view of the world seen through a viewfinder, a way of flattening the earth so it can be better managed by people in uniforms.

We are taught that maps are about making the intangible tangible, but I think it is usually the other way around. A map takes a physical, muddy, breathing piece of earth and turns it into a narrative. It is a story told by the person holding the pen. For centuries, the Cartesian grid has been laid over the globe like a heavy net, imposing a specific Western logic on places that already had their own rhythms. It turned the wildness of the world into a series of coordinates that could be owned and measured. When I look at the blue pulsing dot on my phone, I feel that same clinical authority. Google and Apple do not show me where I am; they show me the most efficient path to where I am supposed to spend money.

The imperialist eye and the tripod

There is a specific kind of arrogance in the surveyor’s tripod. To map a place “officially,” you have to stand on a high point and claim the view through a lens. It is a voyeuristic, top-down power dynamic. The British OS maps come from this history of looking down on the land to see how it can be used, defended, or taxed. The surveyor doesn’t care about the smell of the wild garlic in the woods or the way the wind catches in a particular hollow; they care about the gradient and the line of sight. By contrast, an artist starts in the mud. We don’t look down; we look across. We are entangled in the hedges and the puddles, and our maps should probably reflect that lack of distance.

When I use a digital map, I feel a strange sort of sensory deprivation. Everything is rendered in the same flat, vectorised aesthetic. The machine has no memory of what was there before. It doesn’t show the ghost of the corner shop that closed ten years ago or the exact spot where I fell off my bike and scarred my knee. The “current state” of the digital map is a constant present, scrubbed clean of the hauntings that actually make a neighbourhood feel like home. It is a map without a soul, a collection of data points that ignores the layers of time that sit beneath the tarmac.

The luxury of being lost

I have started drawing my own maps lately. They are objectively useless for navigation. They focus on the wrong things – the sound of the weir behind the old mill, the specific shade of rust on a gate, or the memory of a conversation that happened at a particular street corner. An artist acting as a cartographer is a small, quiet act of rebellion. It is a kick back against the authoritarian clarity of a GPS. In a world of “Blue Dot” precision, being lost is now treated as a technical failure rather than a human experience. We have outsourced our sense of direction to a lithium-ion cell, and the resulting anxiety when the battery hits five percent is a symptom of how much we have given away.

By ignoring the grid, you start to see the gaps where the military and the tech giants forgot to look. My maps do not care about the shortest route. They care about the weight of the air and the way a certain hill feels on the backs of your legs. Drawing a map is a way to download the world into your own muscles, to claim a place not as a territory, but as a feeling. It is not about accuracy; it is about the truth of being in a place. We spend so much time following the lines others have drawn for us that we forget we are allowed to smudge them. I think I will leave the OS map on the table for now and just go for a walk until I find something that is not on the grid.