Country Life - National Map Centre
http://www.countrylife.co.uk/blogs/spectator
I shared Carla Carlisle’s shock when I learned, during a visit there last week to purchase an essential rain-proof street map of Edinburgh, that the National Map Centre was to close (Spectator, ‘Map-reading by heart’ August 24).
Every journey may begin with a single step, but prior to that the wise traveller would make a quick trip to the National Map Centre. It is here that one finds not just guide-books and globes and maps and memoirs, but a sense of adventure.
A good book shop is not stocked, it is curated. It is a pleasure to spend time there browsing and one frequently leaves not just with one’s intended purchase, but other discoveries as well. Such a store is the National Map Centre.
The National Map Centre sells not just OS maps, guides and travel writing, but huge wall-sized world maps, ideal for plotting foreign trips or world domination. These fascinate because many do not always place Great Britain in the centre of the map. The different projections of the world challenge traditional views and present a different way of looking at things. Yet this does not diminish our importance, a map is a way of finding your way home, and home is always the most important place in the world.
The National Map Centre is important also. The adventurers great and small that have started there must be countless. When it closes, the world will be a slightly darker, duller place, and that much harder to navigate.
I shared Carla Carlisle’s shock when I learned, during a visit there last week to purchase an essential rain-proof street map of Edinburgh, that the National Map Centre was to close (Spectator, ‘Map-reading by heart’ August 24).
Every journey may begin with a single step, but prior to that the wise traveller would make a quick trip to the National Map Centre. It is here that one finds not just guide-books and globes and maps and memoirs, but a sense of adventure.
A good book shop is not stocked, it is curated. It is a pleasure to spend time there browsing and one frequently leaves not just with one’s intended purchase, but other discoveries as well. Such a store is the National Map Centre.
The National Map Centre sells not just OS maps, guides and travel writing, but huge wall-sized world maps, ideal for plotting foreign trips or world domination. These fascinate because many do not always place Great Britain in the centre of the map. The different projections of the world challenge traditional views and present a different way of looking at things. Yet this does not diminish our importance, a map is a way of finding your way home, and home is always the most important place in the world.
The National Map Centre is important also. The adventurers great and small that have started there must be countless. When it closes, the world will be a slightly darker, duller place, and that much harder to navigate.
Labels: Books, Bookshops, Country Life, Country Life magazine, Maps
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