The man trying to save Britain’s last great map library
From our UK edition
In the heart of Bloomsbury, deep in the bowels of the UCL geography department, down corridors floored in institutional linoleum, sticky and scuffed by generations of students, is a room full of maps. Hundreds of thousands stacked on top of each other, tidied away in sliding wooden drawers that march to the ceiling. But not only maps: there are shelves groaning with atlases, guidebooks and Baedeckers; an entire annexe given over to hundreds of wall charts. In fact, almost every conceivable way you might orient yourself on the globe, or make legible any geographical phenomenon on paper, is represented here. It’s a cartophile’s delight; an obsessive compulsive’s nightmare.
