ABSTRACT
Mapping place? Hard not to, when even the most ordinary topographic survey sheet, created with the maximum dispassion, can turn into what Brian Harley called ‘a subjective symbol of place’ when scanned by a human eye (Harley, 1987). At the time he was specifically referring to ‘Ordnance Survey Map, Six-inch Sheet Devonshire, CIX, SE, Newton Abbot’, a map of a piece of earth he had come to know intimately. He’d lived on it for seventeen years, both his children had attended school there, and that’s where he buried his wife and son. The map had ‘become a graphic autobiography’, it restored ‘time to memory’, and it recreated for his ‘inner eye the fabric and seasons of a former life’, all this, a ‘transcription’ of himself, accomplished by what he called ‘a very ordinary map’.
