Magnificent Maps at the British Library

Entry: Free

While this post bears the date that I attended this exhibition it was actually written some time afterwards. I really struggled to find anything to say about.

It's an exhibition of maps, held at the British Library. It's big, divided into eight large sections, and contains a huge range of maps from a wide selection of time periods and cultures. The show's sub-title is “Power, Propaganda and Art”, which should give you some clue as to the themes being explored. These are not A-Z street maps intended to help you navigate a town; these are sumptuous artworks intended to show learning, wealth, power and military might.

So why the difficulty in writing this post? I think my problem with the exhibition stemmed in part from its odd arrangement. The maps are supposedly arranged “according to the setting in which they were originally displayed”, the eight settings being the Gallery, the Audience Chamber, the Bedchamber, the Cabinet of Curiosities, the Street, the Merchant's House, the Secretary of State's Office, and the Schoolroom. I'm not at all convinced of these differences. Even after rereading the exhibition guide I don't see that the maps in the Gallery section differ hugely from the maps in, for example, the Secretary of State's office. There's also a few which I'm sure are in the wrong place. There's a Grayson Perry artwork on display that echoes a mappa mundi, a medieval world map, and which appears, very logically, alongside some real mappae mundi – in the section called “the Bedchamber”. Why bother with these silly divisions if you plan to ignore them anyway?

Rereading this it sounds like a fairly minor complaint even to myself, but I strongly believe that clear organisation is vital to a large exhibition. Both this and the Skin exhibition at the Wellcome Collection have an abundance of beautiful objects, but weak thematic organisation.

The other problem is that after five rooms of maps you might find yourself a bit tired of maps, and you'll still have three more rooms to go. There's some lovely oddities, such as the world's largest atlas, but my attention was beginning to wander after walls and walls of maps. The “Street” section came as a welcome change of pace, offering a selection of overtly political maps drawn from journals and newspapers. These were often satirical or humorous propaganda pieces from the twentieth century and they definitely livened the exhibition up.

In conclusion, it's a rather poorly arranged exhibition with lots and lots and lots of maps. Beautiful and interesting maps certainly, but mostly lots of maps.