A NATIONAL ATLAS
By PROF. E. G. R. TAYLOR*
HOW many of us have actually handled a Government Blue Book, or read one? The Census of Population, for example, or of Occupations, the Returns of the Ministry of Agriculture, the Book of Normals prepared by the Meteorologi- cal Section of the Air Ministry? The proportion even among readers of The Spectator must be a very small one, among the general public it is negligible. Priceless though they may be to the professional statistician, the endless columns of figures in the average Government publication are meaningless to the average citizen: and yet they contain information which to him, as citizen, is vitally important.
How is this dilemma to be resolved? Quite simply. Most of us today can read and enjoy a map. Most statistics, in so far as they are related to places and areas, can be translated into maps. Such was the genesis of the idea of a National Atlas of Britain. All the information about our country and its people that Government departments so laboriously collect, much information, too, that is collected by scientists and scientific bodies, can be placed in visual form between the covers of an Atlas of perhaps one hundred large folio plates. Such an Atlas could be produced at a price that would enable it to lie on the desk of every man and woman of affairs, of every student of his own times and country.
Already the plan and contents of the Atlas have been care- fully worked out by a group of scientists drawn from the various sections of the British Association, and the plan can be studied in the Quarterly Report of that body published in February last. The responsible Committee is now watching the trend of events in order to choose the right moment for seeking to bridge the gap between plan and execution. That moment must come soon, for the planning of post-War Britain is already occupying many men's thoughts, and planners must have clearly before them the surface pattern of our land as it is today—the pattern of land-use, the pattern of occupations, even the pattern of scenic beauty—or otherwise in ridding us of what is faulty and evil they may fail to conserve and restore our heritage of good.
It is to foster a sense of the past as well as to explain the present that the plan of the National Atlas includes a section on History and even on Pre-history. For the face of Britain is, as it were, a palimpsest. When the Romans drew upon its surface a new pattern of forts and farms, roads and colonies, they did not quite erase the older pattern of field boundaries, track-ways and hamlets drawn by the Ancient Britons. After the Romans, Saxon and Dane, Norman and Elizabethan, have successively put their mark upon the land, and no post-War Britain, however splendid, could be tolerated that for ever wiped out their traces. But not only in the historical sense, in the physical sense, too, it must be fully understood that the surface of the land is no tabula rasa. Side by side in the National Atlas there will appear maps showing its configura- tion, its rocky structure, its soil, its rain, sunshine, cloud and fog, its hidden wealth of minerals, stones and clays, its potential
* The writer of this article is Professor of Geography in the Univer- sity of London.
water-supply, liability to drought and flood, and a host of o matters which must be well weighed before we can say "h an industry shall be planted, there a garden city or dormit town."
So too the agricultural section of the Atlas will give planner pause. He is, unfortunately, a townsman, for wh all land, unless it is built upon, is f` undeveloped." But on succession of plates he will see that there is a very defini pattern of agricultural land-use agreeing with the patterns soil and drainage and climate. Our best market-gardening lan lying as it did in Middlesex and Essex, is already almost a swallowed up beyond repair, as is some fine dairying coun in the North-West. But our best corn-lands, grazing lan fruit country can yet be preserved by an informed public opinio from an ill-informed Ministry of Planning.
It is not the least of the merits of an Atlas of the type e visaged (and it must be remarked that France, Poland, Czech Slovakia, Finland and other European countries have alread put these ideas into execution) that the setting out side side on a uniform scale of particular maps suggests new lin of enquiry into cause and effect. The Czecho-Slovak Natio Atlas, for example, and here it will probably be imitate devotes a number of maps to vital statistics, and particular to the regional incidence of the more frequent diseases. contrasts revealed are striking, not only as between urban a rural neighbourhoods, but as between one ethnic or cultur group and another. France, again, maps the political "colour of her people, in accordance with the party votes returned different dates. The pattern is by no means a random on nor would it be so in this country.
The sociological or " human " section of the Nation Atlas will perl-ops prove the more attractive. He he will see the score or so of different ways in which Brita. is divided up by different Governmental authorities for vario administrative and statistical purposes. Here he will see w are his cultural opportunities in different parts of the country colleges, schools, galleries, museums, national parks, b' sanctuaries, ancient monuments, and other amenities. He too, he will learn where he may find rustic solitude, for it perhaps into this section of the Atlas that the map should inserted that shows those parts of Britain four miles or mo from any railway station! Bradshaw is a statistical work lends itself profitably to mapping. When this is done, it found that ready accessibility by rail within business hours a great factor in the prosperity of individual centres. It found, too, that this accessibility is by no means a function distance, nor even always of the size of the centre soug Nor is it without significance that the pattern of p accessibility was matched by the pattern of unemploym during the period of depression. Such maps, then, shoal give the planner pause before he commits himself with reserve to a scheme for the scatter of population and industry.
Yet some scatter there must be, alike from the point of vi of health and of safety. In this connexion, the informati now in Government hands upon the spatial incidence of bomb and upon the emergency war-time scatter of munitions fa tories will demand mapping when the right time comes. Onl so can an answer be given to the question, which of di new locations will prove good locations when swords are on more beaten into ploughshares? But this in its turn rai a new and a last point. If the National Atlas is to be cornple and up to date, it must be based on statistical material in hands of Government departments. While more than o great scientific body could be named that would sponsor Atlas once some financial backing was in sight (and aireaa private generosity has made possible preliminary spade work it would be perhaps more fitting and .more effective for National Atlas to be the nation's concern. The Goverrme can command a great map-making establishment, the Ordnan Survey Office, where plant, equipment and technical skill 3 unsurpassed. The co-operation of scientists, each eminent I his own sphere, has already been freely promised. But remains for the nation to want its National Atlas!
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