Britain and Northern Ireland in Maps: A Review

Summary

Roland J. Fuchs reviews The Atlas of Britain and Northern Ireland, produced over ten years by Clarendon Press and an editorial committee of Oxford and Cambridge scholars as a private venture after government support failed to materialize. Its 200 pages of maps record the United Kingdom's measurable resources. Fuchs finds the substantial physical-geography coverage appropriate; industry occupies the largest section, alongside agriculture, population, housing, transport, and communications. He discusses methods including climate variability diagrams, vegetation maps reduced from Ordnance Survey mapping, and employment-based industrial maps using proportional wedges, together with a transparent overlay and detailed source documentation. He praises the cartographic standards and originality of many maps, but considers demographic coverage too brief. Questioning the atlas's ambition to provide self-contained reference information, he criticizes crowded detail, redundant regional maps, reliance on readers' visual comparisons to establish relationships, and limited treatment of change. Despite these reservations, he judges it a superior production of interest to geographers generally and urges library acquisition, noting its restrictive price.