6 Surprising Map Facts
Maps look reassuringly authoritative. Neat lines, precise place names, everything apparently exactly where it should be.
Except maps have contained imaginary mountains, deliberately invented towns, wandering North Poles and some very strange ideas about which way is up.
Here are six of our favourite map facts.
1. Some places on maps don't actually exist
For centuries, mapmakers worked with incomplete information. Inevitably, things occasionally appeared on maps that weren't actually there.
One of the most famous examples is the Mountains of Kong, a supposedly vast mountain range stretching across West Africa. They first appeared on a map by British geographer James Rennell in 1798 and continued to turn up on maps throughout much of the 19th century.
There was just one problem.
They didn't exist.
But not every imaginary place was a mistake. Mapmakers have also deliberately planted fictional streets, towns and other features as copyright traps. Find the same invented place on somebody else's map and you've got a pretty good clue about where they got their information.
We couldn't resist having a go ourselves. For April Fool's Day we created the Island of Bait, conveniently located just off the coast of Great Britain.
We stopped short of putting it on our actual World Map.
Probably for the best.
2. The world isn't where you think it is
The world map most of us recognise is based on the Mercator projection, created in 1569.
And Mercator is brilliant at what it was designed to do. It allowed sailors to plot a constant compass bearing as a straight line — enormously useful when you're trying to cross an ocean.
What it isn't particularly good at is showing the relative sizes of countries and continents.
As you move towards the poles, land becomes increasingly enlarged. Greenland can appear comparable in size to Africa, despite Africa actually being around 14 times larger.
That's not really a mistake. It's the unavoidable consequence of trying to flatten a spherical planet onto a rectangular surface.
Every world map projection makes compromises somewhere. Some preserve direction, some area, some shape — but none can preserve everything.
Which is why there isn't really such a thing as the world map. There are lots of different ways of looking at the same planet.
See our guide to world map projections →
3. North isn't always up
North at the top feels so natural that it's easy to assume maps have always worked that way.
They haven't.
Different cultures and different periods have put different directions at the top. Many medieval European maps were oriented towards the east, which held particular significance in the Christian world.
The extraordinary Hereford Mappa Mundi, made around 1300, puts east at the top and Jerusalem at the centre. The entire known world was drawn onto one enormous piece of calfskin.
There's even a linguistic legacy. The Latin oriens refers to the east or rising sun and is the root of orient and orientation.
So every time you orient a map, there's a little bit of medieval mapmaking hiding in the language.
4. And North doesn't even stay put
It gets worse.
There isn't just one North.
True North points towards the Geographic North Pole — the fixed point where the Earth's rotational axis meets its surface.
Magnetic North is determined by the Earth's magnetic field. It's where your compass points.
And it moves.
The North Magnetic Pole has wandered considerably since scientists first located it and is currently moving at around 36 kilometres a year.
Even more remarkably, the Earth's magnetic field has reversed many times during its history, with magnetic north and south effectively changing places.
So north isn't necessarily at the top.
And even when you find it, it won't necessarily stay there.
It's also one of the reasons we find polar-centred maps so fascinating. Put the North Pole in the middle rather than at the top and suddenly the relationships between North America, Greenland, Europe and Russia look completely different.
5. There's an island at 0°, 0° that doesn't exist
You might imagine that satellites, GPS and digital mapping finally put an end to imaginary places.
Not quite.
Welcome to Null Island.
Its address is 0° latitude, 0° longitude — exactly where the Equator meets the Prime Meridian in the Gulf of Guinea.
There is no island there. It's open ocean.
But 0°, 0° has become notorious in digital mapping because missing, corrupted or incorrectly formatted geographic coordinates can end up being assigned to that point.
Over time, people working with geographic data gave this accidental destination a name: Null Island.
So more than two centuries after the Mountains of Kong, we're still putting places on maps that don't exist.
We've just found considerably more sophisticated ways of doing it.
6. Some maps were designed to be hidden
During the Second World War, maps weren't only used to find your way around. Some were deliberately designed to disappear.
Britain's MI9 produced escape maps for Allied servicemen and prisoners of war, including maps printed onto silk that could be folded into a tiny space and concealed in clothing.
Unlike paper, silk was tough, lightweight and could be folded repeatedly without falling apart — rather useful qualities if your map needed to survive an escape.
Maps and other escape aids were concealed and smuggled to prisoners, becoming tools not just for navigation but for survival.
It's an extreme example of something that's always been true about maps: what a map is for determines what kind of map it becomes.
A medieval map could tell a religious story. A geological map reveals what lies beneath our feet. An escape map could be hidden inside your clothes.
And today, with extraordinarily good navigation sitting in our pockets, a printed map doesn't necessarily have to tell us how to get anywhere at all.
It can be something to study, something to write on, something to pin memories to — or simply something beautiful to live with.
That's really the idea behind our own maps. They're still proper reference maps, full of places and information, but we also make them to work as pieces of graphic wall art.
Which, admittedly, is rather convenient for us.