The national atlas of Great Britain and reflections on it ahead of the London congress

Summary

The article reviews The Atlas of Britain and Northern Ireland (Clarendon Press, 1963) before the London geographical congress. It traces preparation from the establishment of a Cambridge committee in 1938 through wartime interruption and unsuccessful funding efforts to Oxford University Press’s involvement in 1951, which secured support from public institutions, research organizations, firms, and individual scholars. Publication followed twelve years of work. Reviewing the atlas’s 200 map pages and comparing thematic page allocations, the author finds that natural conditions and resources occupy 33% and the economy 51.5%, with extensive coverage of geology, vegetation, industry, agriculture, and transport but little coverage of culture and several important omissions. The author praises printing, colors, page composition, supplementary diagrams and statistics, transparent symbols, sector signs, and land-use backgrounds. Detailed examples also expose limitations: climate and hydrology are often represented by observation points without geographical interpretation; vegetation maps leave agricultural land uncharacterized; most industrial maps rely on employment counts; population maps repeat the same distribution with changing attributes; and strong photographic relief reduces regional-map legibility. The central criticism is the dominance of narrowly analytical mapping and the scarcity of synthesis, including maps of climate regions, natural landscapes, agricultural specialization, mineral resources, economic regions, and the national economy as a whole. The author treats these deficiencies as problems of geographical scholarship while leaving their institutional and disciplinary causes open. The forthcoming congress is expected to help clarify the questions raised by an atlas the author nevertheless regards as a major original work and a notable stage in national-atlas development.