BMG Online Space

This is my final version of my video map idea, it will gradually be updated as extra video’s need to be placed into it.

View map here

This is link through to an external website about A History of the London Tube Maps.

Taken from BBC iPlayer

The Beauty of Maps – 4. Cartoon Maps – Politics and Satire

❝Documentary series charting the visual appeal and historical meaning of maps.

The series concludes by delving into the world of satirical maps. How did maps take on a new form, not as geographical tools, but as devices for humour, satire or storytelling? Graphic Artist Fred Rose perfectly captured the public mood in 1880 with his General Election maps featuring Gladstone and Disraeli, using the maps to comment upon crucial election issues still familiar to us today. Technology was on the satirist’s side with the advent of high-speed printing allowing for larger runs at lower cost. In 1877, when Rose produced his ‘Serio Comic Map of Europe at War’, maps began to take on a new direction and form, reflecting a changing world.

Rose’s map exploited these possibilities to the full using a combination of creatures and human figures to represent each European nation. The personification of Russia as a grotesque-looking octopus, extending its tentacles around the surrounding nations, perfectly symbolised the threat the country posed to its neighbours.❞

The Beauty of Maps BBC website

Taken from BBC iPlayer

The Beauty of Maps – 3. Atlas Maps – Thinking Big

❝Documentary series charting the visual appeal and historical meaning of maps.

The Dutch Golden Age saw map-making reach a fever pitch of creative and commercial ambition. This was the era of the first ever Atlases – elaborate, lavish and beautiful. This was the great age of discovery and marked an unprecedented opportunity for mapmakers who sought to record and categorise the newly acquired knowledge of the world. Rising above the many mapmakers in this period was Gerard Mercator, inventor of the Mercator projection, who changed mapmaking forever when he published his collection of world maps in 1598 and coined the term ‘Atlas’.

The programme looks at some of the largest and most elaborate maps ever produced, from the vast maps on the floor of the Royal Palace in Amsterdam, to the 24 volume atlas covering just the Netherlands, to the largest Atlas in the world, The Klencke Atlas. It was made for Charles II to mark his restoration in 1660. But whilst being one of the British Libraries most important items, it is also one of its most fragile so hardly ever opened. This is a unique opportunity to see inside this enormous and lavish work, and see the world through the eyes of a King.❞

The Beauty of Maps BBC website

Taken from BBC iPlayer

The Beauty of Maps – 2. City Maps – Order out of Chaos

❝Documentary series charting the visual appeal and historical meaning of maps.

The British Library is home to a staggering 4.5 million maps, most of which remain hidden away in its colossal basement, and the programme delves behind the scenes to explore some amazing treasures in more detail. This is the story of three maps, three ‘visions’ of London over three centuries; visions of beauty that celebrate but also distort the truth. It’s the story of how urban maps try to impose order on chaos.

On Sunday 2 September 1660, the Great Fire of London began reducing most of the city to ashes, and among the huge losses were many maps of the city itself. The Morgan Map of 1682 was the first to show the whole of the City of London after the fire. Consisting of sixteen separate sheets, measuring eight feet by five feet, it took six years to complete. Morgan’s beautiful map symbolised the hoped-for ideal city.

In 1746 John Rocque produced at the time the most detailed map ever made of London. Like Morgan’s, Rocque’s map is all neo-Classical beauty and clinical precision, but the London it represented had become the opposite. In engravings of the time, such as Night, the artist William Hogarth shows a city boiling with vice and corruption. Stephen Walter’s contemporary image, The Island, plays with notions of cartographic order and respectability. His extraordinary London map looks at first glance to be just as precise and ordered as his hero Rocque’s but, looking closer, it includes 21st century markings such as ‘favourite kebab vans’ and sites of ‘personal heartbreak’.❞

The Beauty of Maps BBC website

The Beauty of Maps is a BBC 4 television series on the history of maps, I have only just come across this programme and seems really interesting, I’ve still got episode’s 2 and 3 to watch. I stumbled across this programme by accident while browsing on the BBC iPlayer and watching at the moment.

At the beginning of episode 1 of the series the introduction to maps was a good way of describing them.

❝ The British Library in London is home to a staggering 4 and a half million maps. Mysterious and beautiful these rarely seen treasures are much more than just physical depictions of the world.  The map is definitely by far the best synthesis of typography, so the geography of a place together with it’s history and of course art as well so you’ve got all great themes all combining in one to produce something of huge beauty. Our lover fair with maps is as old as civilization it’s self. Each map tells it’s own story and hides it’s own secrets, maps delight, they unsettle, they revile deep truths, not just about where we come from but about who we are. A map is a thing of beauty it’s a place where perhaps you express the cosmos you try and bring together the whole view of the world so you can understand it… ❞

This is a transcript from episode 1 and you can continue to watch this programme on the BBC iPlayer here.

Taken from BBC iPlayer

The Beauty of Maps – 1. Medieval Maps – Mapping the Medieval Mind

❝Documentary series charting the visual appeal and historical meaning of maps.

The Hereford Mappa Mundi is the largest intact Medieval wall map in the world and its ambition is breathtaking – to picture all of human knowledge in a single image. The work of a team of artists, the world it portrays is overflowing with life, featuring Classical and Biblical history, contemporary buildings and events, animals and plants from across the globe, and the infamous ‘monstrous races’ which were believed to inhabit the remotest corners of the Earth.

The Mappa Mundi, meaning ‘cloth of the world’, has spent most of its long life at Hereford Cathedral, rarely emerging from behind its glass case. The programme represents a rare opportunity to get close to the map and explore its detail, giving a unique insight into the Medieval mind. This is also the first programme to show the map in its original glory, revealing the results of a remarkable year-long project by the Folio Society to restore it using the latest digital technology.

The map has a chequered history. Since its glory days in the 1300s it has languished forgotten in storerooms, been dismissed as a curious ‘monstrosity’, and controversially almost sold. Only in the last 20 years have scholars and artists realised its true depth and meaning, with the map exerting an extraordinary power over those who come into contact with it. The programme meets some of these individuals, from scholars and map lovers to Turner Prize-winning artist Grayson Perry, whose own work, the Map of Nowhere, is inspired by the Mappa Mundi.❞

The Beauty of Maps BBC website