The School’s map collection includes many items from World War Two, evidence of the close relationship between cartography and war. One of the more eye-catching examples is a large, 1:1 million ‘Ethnographical Map of Central Europe’, printed in Budapest in 1942 with title and accompanying text in English. Mounted on a canvas base, the map is an exuberant riot of coloured dots, not unlike a pointillist abstract painting (Figure 1 for scale, and Figure 2 for detail).[1] But appearances can deceive. This is probably the most sinister item in the School’s collection, a vision of Nazi-dominated central Europe intended to justify invasion, occupation and genocide.

Figure 1 – click to enlarge

Centred on the Great Hungarian plain, the map depicts territories in ten interwar countries, from south-eastern Germany and north-eastern Italy to the Soviet Republic of Ukraine and the Black Sea coastlines of Rumania and northern Bulgaria. The region’s complex political geography, transformed by German military expansion, is indicated by separate lines for Hungary’s pre-1918 borders, the international frontiers between 1920 and 1938, and the 1942 borders, including those enclosing the German Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and the German-occupied General Government in Poland.

Figure 2 – click to enlarge

Notes on sources and methods, written in English and presumably intended for an international audience, indicate the huge effort involved in the map’s production (Figures 3 and 4). Data on seventeen ethnicities, gleaned from interwar national censuses, are displayed in vivid colours for areas with high population density where a single ethnic community predominated. Urban populations are represented by pie-charts of varying sizes divided into coloured segments for different ethnicities. Pie-charts for 34 of the region’s largest cities, from Trieste in the west to Lemberg (Lviv) in the east, are gathered around the map’s edges.

We don’t know when, why or how this map was acquired by the School of Geography. It is one of hundreds of thematic maps prepared before and during World War Two by the Hungarian Institute of Political Sciences (IPS), a semi-official agency established in Budapest in 1926 by Pál Teleki (1879-1941), a professor of geography at the University of Budapest who was also Hungary’s Prime Minister in 1920-1 and 1939-41. Copies of the map exist in several libraries around the world. The British War Office printed its own edition in 1944 for reasons that remain unclear.

Figure 3 – click to enlarge

Figure 4 – click to enlarge

The map is a development of the Carte Rouge, a similar 1:1 million ethnographic map of pre-1914 Hungary designed by Teleki and prepared by the Hungarian Geographical Society in 1918-9 using data from the 1910 census of Austria-Hungary. An updated version of the Carte Rouge, named after the scarlet colour used to indicate areas where Hungarians were the majority population, forms the 1942 map’s bright red epicentre.

The Carte Rouge was the main piece of evidence presented by the Hungarian delegation in its doomed attempt to prevent the country’s dismemberment at the Treaty of Trianon in June 1920. This punitive accord obliged Hungary to surrender 64% of its pre-war territory and 72% of its population to neighbouring countries, chiefly Rumania (which acquired the whole of Transylvania, Teleki’s native region) and newly-established Poland and Czechoslovakia. The Trianon borders conformed to very different ethnographic maps prepared by advisers working for Britain, France, the United States and the new central European countries, including the geographers Isaiah Bowman, Jovan Cvijić, Viktor Dvorský, Emmanuel de Martonne, and Eugenius Romer.

The Carte Rouge lost the Trianon ‘battle of the maps’ but was soon adopted as the cartographic symbol of Hungarian irredentism. Simplifed versions of the map appeared through the interwar decades in school textbooks, atlases, postage stamps, and propaganda posters lamenting the injustices of Trianon. Teleki, by then a powerful politician, was determined that Hungary would never again be ‘outmapped’ by hostile neighbours. The task of the IPS was to provide bigger, better and more convincing ethnographic maps to justify the eventual return of territories and populations lost in 1920.

By the mid-1930s, the IPS had the largest map library in Central Europe, located from 1941 in the elegant salons of the Esterházy Palace in central Budapest. The IPS staff of 15 statisticians and cartographers, led by Imre Jakabffy, assembled a huge archive of cross-referenced information, much of it in cartographic form, on the injustices experienced by Hungarians living beyond the Trianon borders.

Germany’s influence on Hungary, always substantial, became irresistible after the rise of the Nazis whose geopolitical ambitions initially corresponded with those of Hungarian nationalists. The Munich Agreement, signed in September 1938 by Britain, France, Italy and Germany, forced Czechoslovakia to surrender the Sudetenland to Germany (thereby opening its remaining territory to imminent invasion) and open negotiations with Poland and Hungary about territorial claims in Silesia and Slovakia. Following the first and second ‘Vienna Awards’ in 1938 and 1940, Hungary almost doubled in size at the expense of Czechoslovakia, Rumania and Yugoslavia. IPS maps and statistical reports claimed there were Hungarian majorities in the reclaimed lands though interwar censuses suggested otherwise.

Teleki’s ethnographic obsessions raised many definitional problems, notably about Hungary’s Jewish community. While preparing the Carte Rouge, Teleki claimed Hungarian Jews were an assimilated religious community rather than an ethnic group and should not be identified on the map. During his tenures as Prime Minister, however, he introduced increasingly draconian anti-semitic laws, the first such restrictions in post-1918 Europe, initially to limit Jewish involvement in law, medicine, academia, and journalism, sectors previously dominated by the mainly urban Jewish community, and eventually to reclassify Jews as a racial rather than a religious community.

Teleki signed a tripartite pact with Germany and Italy on 20^th November 1940 in the hope of preserving some measure of independence. Four months later, horrified at the prospect of German occupation, he committed suicide on the 3^rd April 1941, leaving behind an infamous “I am guilty” note. András Rónai, Teleki’s protégé at the IPS (by then a department in the newly established Pál Teleki Research Institute) inherited most of his mentor’s academic positions. Rónai set about completing Teleki’s projects, including the 1942 ethnographic map and a thematic Atlas of Central Europe.[2]

According to the 1941 Hungarian census, there were more than 800,000 Jews in Hungary (5% of the population), 250,000 of whom lived in Budapest (c. 20% of the city’s population). The plight of Hungary’s Jews was increasingly desperate but they were at least protected from an even worse fate by the country’s precarious independence. When this ended with the German occupation in March 1944, the Jewish community was completely exposed to a now brutally efficient genocidal system. Between May and July 1944, more than 430,000 Hungarian Jews were deported on 147 trains, most to Auschwitz, where c. 80% were murdered on arrival. The killing continued for the remainder of the war.[3]

The black marks on Rónai’s map, used to represent Central Europe’s Jews, reveal the horrifying geographies of the Holocaust – actual, unrecorded and anticipated. Once thriving Jewish communities to the west of Hungary, in Austria and Germany, were no longer large enough in the censuses of the mid-1930s to register on the map. Jews were concentrated further north and east, the map suggests, in the towns and cities of Poland, Ukraine and Rumania, even though these huge populations, so prominent in censuses from the 1920s and 1930s, had already been eradicated by 1942 in countless unrecorded mass murders (Figures 1 and 2). The map also anticipated the destruction of Hungary’s still existing Jewish population. Budapest was apparently devoid of Jews in 1942, two years before this large and astonishingly creative community was deported to almost certain death (Figure 5).

Figure 5 – click to enlarge

In a futile attempt to preserve his organisation, Rónai relocated the IPS archive to the lakeside town of Balatonfüred in 1945. Most of the material was seized by the invading Red Army, however, and subsequently disappeared into the Soviet Union. Under the newly installed communist regime, Hungary reverted to its pre-war borders, Rónai was dismissed, and both the IPS and the Hungarian Geographical Society were dissolved in 1948 and 1949 respectively.

[1] Thanks to Gary Priestnall for assistance scanning this unwieldly map.

[2] A few copies of the Atlas were published, in Hungarian and English, in March 1945 and a digital facsimile was produced by the Department of Cartography at the Eötvos Loránd University in Budapest in 1993.

[3] See Tim Cole (2003) Holocaust City: The Making of a Jewish Ghetto (London: Routledge) and several of his more recent articles

The post Anticipating Genocide: An Ethnographic Map of Central Europe in 1942 appeared first on The Map Blog.

Like nearly all substantial map collections, the School of Geography holds a range of maps that depict and represent colonial and postcolonial spaces around the world. Of relevance to my own research interests, this includes a number of maps centred on those areas of the Arctic that have historically come under colonial rule.

Contained in the drawer labelled ‘Greenland,’ one of these maps in particular begs closer inspection. The Map of North Greenland, shown below, was produced by the Geodetic Institute of Denmark in 1932 and is in fact a series of maps which depict the Northern coastline of the island (known to Inuit today as Kalaallit Nunaat) stretching from Avanersuaq to Danmarkfjorden.

Figure 1: Cover page of Map of Northern Greenland (1932). Click to enlarge.

The cover page (Figure 1) gives an overview of the various sections of the Greenland coastline that are included in the series and also reveals that the map was produced using geographical and geological data that had been gathered by a Danish individual named Lauge Koch. Koch was a celebrated geologist and was one of a number of Danish scholars and scientists who spent prolonged periods of time travelling across Greenland in order to conduct surveys and analyses of this intemperate Arctic environment during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Indeed, most of the data for Map of North Greenland was gathered during Koch’s largest expedition, known as ‘The Danish Bicentenary Expedition to North Greenland.’ This expedition took place from 1921 to 1923 and gathered a wide range of information about the geology and geomorphology of the island’s ice-covered Northern coastline. As Figure 2 shows, much of this information has in turn been depicted visually on the map, with blue shading used to represent ice covered areas, and brown shading used to outline the extent of the small islands scattered along the coast. The route taken by the Bicentenary Expedition has also been traced in red.

Figure 2: Map labelled ‘Cape York’ displaying route of the ‘Danish Bicentenary Expedition to North Greenland’ and the geoscientific information collected. Click to englarge.

Today, Koch is not particularly well known beyond his native Denmark. However, during his lifetime, this experienced Arctic scientist was widely celebrated for his work in Greenland, and he received medals and honours from various institutions around the world – including from Britain’s Royal Geographical Society. His ability to conduct rigorous geological investigation, and combine this with the ‘heroic’ and masculine qualities typically associated with Arctic exploration, earned him the respect of both his learned colleagues and the ‘rugged’ Arctic exploration community alike.

Yet, the Map of North Greenland also provides us with an opportunity to reflect on Koch’s scientific contributions more broadly, and to think critically about the wider intellectual contexts in which this survey work was being carried out. Indeed, the name that Koch gave to his expedition, and the ‘Bicentenary’ that it celebrated, gives us some indication as to the more problematic dimensions of Koch’s research, and indeed wider Danish scientific practices taking place in Greenland at the time.

The particular event that Koch’s ‘Bicentenary Expedition’ was commemorating was in fact the first arrival in Greenland of the Danish Missionary Hans Egede. Egede is now a highly controversial figure in the history Danish-Greenlandic relations. He was one of the earliest colonial settlers on the island and was one of the first Europeans to enact profound interventions into the lives of its indigenous Inuit inhabitants. As part of his religious missionary activities, Egede sought to convert the indigenous population to Christianity and in the process prohibited many of their cultural practices and beliefs.

Egede has therefore come to signify the troubling history of Danish colonial rule in Greenland, and has been a focal point for recent tensions surrounding it’s ongoing legacies. For example, a statue commemorating Egede, situated in Greenland’s capital Nuuk, was recently defaced, with the word ‘decolonise’ spray-painted across its base. Although a subsequent referendum in Nuuk voted to retain the statue, any commemoration of Egede continues to evoke a considerable degree of political tension in both Greenland and beyond.

The ‘Danish Bicentenary Expedition’, and the Map of North Greenland that was produced as a result, are therefore important reminders of the inextricable connection between Arctic geographical science and Danish colonial rule during this period. While Koch’s expeditions in Northern Greenland were certainly scientific in nature, and generated the substantial amounts of geographical data presented on the map, it is important to recognise that this work was funded and supported by the Danish colonial state. Furthermore, the information gathered during his expeditions was in turn used to inform and sustain Danish colonial rule in the region. Recording the locations of Inuit settlements and carefully surveying the coastline and ice conditions to facilitate travel in the area, Koch’s survey work aided the Danish government in its colonial governance of the local Inuit population. The maps extensive use of non-indigenous placenames (such as ‘Thule’, ‘Steensby Land’, ‘Olrik Fjord’ shown in Figure 3) also reinforces this sense of colonial territorial (dis)possession. Koch added the following note to a report describing the Bicentenary expedition that in many ways encapsulates these colonial sentiments: ‘On May 21 I was able to fly the colours of my country from the cairn … and thus the Dannebrog [Danish flag] had now flown along all the coasts of Greenland.’[1]

Figure 3: Extract from map labelled ‘Cape Parry.’ Click to enlarge.

Geoscience has therefore had a profoundly troubling history in the Arctic, and the maps contained in the School’s collections are the tangible remnants of these problematic pasts. It is therefore vitally important to be aware of these pervasive colonial connections when engaging with any map collection, and be mindful of the ongoing injustices faced by indigenous peoples around the world that have resulted from such historical episodes of geoscientific activity.

[1] Koch, L. (1923) ‘Preliminary Report on the Results of the Danish Bicentenary Expedition to North Greenland, The Geographical Journal, 62(2), pp. 103-117.

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A blog by Dr David Beckingham

I am the co-curator of an exhibition called Last Orders: Stories of Alcohol and Abstinence in the East Midlands, on display at the Weston Gallery at Lakeside Arts until October.

The exhibition examines a series of tensions that gathered around drink in the two centuries before the First World War.  It promotes the collections held by Manuscripts and Special Collections on King’s Meadow Campus, which have provided me with an excellent opportunity to develop a local focus to my research into the regulation of alcohol.

In my work with the records held at Manuscripts and Special Collections, I regularly came across the names of old pubs whose exact locations I did not know.  I was able to use a range of Ordnance Survey maps in the School of Geography Map Collection to provide background information about the changing licensed landscape of Nottingham.

Today’s Outdoor Leisure series mark pubs with an old-fashioned tankard.  On the maps in the collection, premises are much more likely to have been labelled as either PH (public house), BH (beer house) or Inn.  Although they are seldom named, I was able to combine the map information with details from trade directories to locate specific pubs.

I used these details to prepare a touch-screen computer presentation in the gallery.  Users can click on numbered discs – overlaying a section from Salmon’s map of Nottingham – and read stories from over 20 pubs in the town centre.[1]

Please click to enlarge

Figure 1, Ordnance Survey, 1: 2500, Nottinghamshire 42.6, Edition of 1915

Maps from the School Collection illustrate some of the stories.  One such map (Figure 1) accompanies a story of the Rancliffe Arms on Sussex Street.  From 1835, the Rancliffe Arms provided a home to an Operatives’ Library.  It was one of a series of pubs in Nottingham to do this.  Working people were able to pay a subscription to access a library of some 2,200 volumes[2] Such a connection between drink and education would have upset members of the nineteenth-century temperance movement.  They presented environments such as pubs as degrading.

Campaigners even made maps of the pubs in some cities.  This spatial evidence of their number and density was vital to temperance efforts to call time on drinking.  They seemed to suggest that the ills of an area were an index of the number of pubs.  By that measure, on the evidence of this 1915 map the area might not look too bad: there are pubs on Broad Marsh, two pubs on Red Lion Street (formerly Narrow Marsh), one on Leen Side, and a few on Station Street that would have served railway customers.

Even as licensing magistrates nationwide began to consider and control the number of pubs in different parts of towns and cities, this map points to the complexity of the drink question in late Victorian and early twentieth century Britain.  In addition to sites of industry, the map shows that the area had densely packed and overcrowded housing, which reformers associated with gambling and intemperance.  In this construction, drink seemed to be a function of the conditions of poverty as much as its cause.  This epitomised an urban problem that could never be solved simply by closing a few pubs.

‘Thousands who earn a living do not know how to live’, wrote AR Henderson, the author of a history of Castle Gate’s Congregational Church published in 1905. Castle Gate was just a few streets to the north west of the area on this map, serving wealthier town and Park residents while looking also to the conditions of poverty just ‘a stone’s throw away’.

‘A day of monotonous toil is too often followed by an evening of debauch’, Henderson continued.  ‘Recreation is one of the fundamental needs of the busy toiler.  To find it in a home in the slums is wellnigh impossible.  To look for it in the public-house or on the streets is to court temptation.’  As such, churches and the temperance movement saw part of their role as being to create an alternative social infrastructure to the pub.[3]

References and notes

[1]      Salmon’s 1861 map has been digitised in sections by Manuscripts and Special Collections. These are viewable in the Maps and Plans section of their digital gallery. The Narrow Marsh section shows the Castle Gate Congregational Church.

[2]      William Howie Wylie (1853) Old and New Nottingham (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans; Nottingham: Job Bradshaw, “Journal” Office) page 350. East Midlands Collection, Reference Not 3.D14 WYL.

[3]      A.R. Henderson (1905) History of Castle Gate Congregational Church Nottingham, 1655-1905 (London: James Clarke & Co) East Midlands Collection, Not 3.M72 CAS.

Last Orders: Stories of Alcohol and Abstinence in the East Midlands co-curated by David Beckingham (School of Geography) and Manuscripts and Special Collections is on display at the Weston Gallery, Lakeside Arts, until 9 October.

Items from the East Midlands Collection can be consulted at the Manuscripts and Special Collections reading room, Kings Meadow Campus. An introduction to maps and plans is also available, with a link to a Guide to Nottinghamshire published maps [PDF] held at the archive.

Ordnance Survey items held by the School of Geography are catalogued in NUsearch. To consult them, contact collection curator Elaine Watts.

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The Atlas du Luxembourg. A blog by Professor Mike Heffernan

The School of Geography’s map collection includes several items that highlight a forgotten association between Nottingham geographers and the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. K. C. Edwards (1904-1982), the University’s first Professor of Geography, had a life-long interest in this tiny, land-locked European state. Towards the end of his career, Edwards and some of his Nottingham colleagues prepared the official Atlas du Luxembourg (Figure 1, main image).

Published by the Luxembourg Ministry of Education in February 1971, a few months after Edwards retired, the Atlas du Luxembourg is a substantial (40 x 50 cm) volume. Written in French, it contains more than 140 maps of various sizes and formats organised into six sections on the country’s history, physical geography, administration, demography, economy, and society. The contents range from simple maps of administrative divisions to complex, richly coloured maps of geology, relief, soils and vegetation, all accompanied by textual commentaries and details on data sources (Figure 2). There are also several choropleth and analytical maps featuring pie-charts, histograms, and flow diagrams. It is not known how many volumes were published but the School’s copy is No. 400.

Figure 2 Atlas du Luxembourg, Sheet 206/0: Soils. Click to enlarge.

National Atlases

The Atlas du Luxembourg is one of several national atlases in the School’s collection, most published during ‘the age of National Atlases’, from the 1920s to the 1970s, when newly independent states in Europe and former colonial empires sought to promote the richness and variety of their national territories for domestic and international audiences (Yonge 1957, 570). After 1945, national atlases were also prepared for urban and regional planning (Short 2022).

The first national atlas to include topographic, thematic and diagrammatic representations of physical and human geographical features was the Atlas öfver Finland, unveiled at the 1899 International Geographical Congress (IGC) in Berlin to reinforce Finnish claims for independence from the Russian Empire. More than 70 countries published national atlases during the 20^th century, beginning with the 1906 Atlas of Canada, likewise informed by the campaign for greater Canadian autonomy within the British Empire.

Some national atlases were years in the making. The final maps for the Atlas de France, initiated in 1931, were published in 1946. Other projects ended in failure. A UK national atlas was suggested at the Cambridge meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1938. The idea was developed during World War II by the geographer Eva Taylor, part of a ‘master plan’ for national economic renewal based on the Barlow, Scott and Beveridge reports, but the proposal came to nought (Taylor 1940, 1941, 1945).

The communist governments of Central and Eastern Europe produced several innovative national atlases during the Cold War. In 1956, the International Geographical Union (IGU) established a Commission on National and Regional Atlases to advise governments hoping to prepare atlases. The Commission was chaired by Konstantin Sališčev, one of the Russian cartographers responsible for the Great Soviet World Atlas, published in 1937 and 1939.

K. C. Edwards and Luxembourg

That Luxembourg, a country the size of Derbyshire, should have decided a national atlas was necessary to mark its centenary in 1967 underlines the importance of cartographic projects for national prestige.[1] As the Grand Duchy had neither a university nor a mapping agency at the time, and as its government was reluctant to involve cartographers from adjacent countries, the IGU Commission recommended recruiting experts from further afield.

Edwards was the obvious candidate. He had organised fieldtrips to Luxembourg since the early 1930s, in association with the Le Play Society, and had welcomed dozens of Luxembourg students to Nottingham (Edwards 1933). On 3^rd September 1939, the day Britain declared war on Germany, Edwards was forced to abandon a journey, already underway, to the Luxembourg town of Diekirch where he was to deliver a lecture at an agricultural exhibition.[2] Impressed by his knowledge, the exiled Luxembourg government in London repeatedly approached Edwards for advice and provided him with information for the substantial ‘Admiralty Handbook’ he prepared on the Grand Duchy for the Naval Intelligence Division (Edwards 1944). In recognition of his wartime efforts, Edwards was made a Commander of Luxembourg’s Grand Ducal Order of the Oak Crown in May 1948 (Figure 3).

Figure 3 The official certificate, signed by Charlotte, Grand Duchess of Luxembourg (1896-1985), confirming Edwards as Commander of the Grand Order of the Oak Crown, 28th May 1948 (UoNMSC, GB 159 KCE 3/2/1). Click to enlarge.

On 6^th February 1967, Edwards summarised his views on Luxembourg in a public lecture delivered in the University’s Portland Building to mark the country’s centenary. The Grand Duchy is Europe in microcosm, Edwards claimed: ‘a very small but fully-developed sovereign state… [that] exhibits the full and complex organisation of a state many times its size (Edwards 1967, 14). Its geographical location, forested uplands and fertile lowlands, integrated and efficient industrial and agricultural sectors, stable and democratic government, and cosmopolitan, multi-lingual population made Luxembourg the natural home for pan-European institutions (Edwards 1961).

Work began on the Atlas du Luxembourg in 1968. Edwards already possessed a mass of statistical information but was given access to additional data from unpublished government reports. He drew heavily on his Nottingham academic colleagues, notably Dr Catherine Delano-Smith, a recently appointed, French-speaking Assistant Lecturer who undertook some of the data analysis. The maps were drawn by two full-time cartographers in the Department’s Drawing Office, Keith Bowler and Carol Chambers.

The only individuals named in the Atlas du Luxembourg are Jean Dupong, the Minister for National Education and later the country’s President, and Edwards, both of whom wrote brief forewords, the latter in English. Delano-Smith was awarded the Luxembourg Order of Merit for her otherwise unacknowledged efforts. A Nottingham deputation of Edwards, Delano-Smith, Bowler and Chambers presented the maps to the Luxembourg Ministry of Education in 1970, before taking a field excursion along the Moselle River.[3]

The Atlas du Luxembourg, prepared in Nottingham more than half a century ago and published two years before the UK joined the European Economic Community, reveals how a British geography department was able to influence the cartographic self-image of a small but important European country and, in so doing, contribute in a minor way to the process of European economic and political integration that Luxembourg has consistently exemplified.

References

Edwards, K. C. (1933) Luxembourg Studies (Le Play Society Student Group)

Edwards, K. C. (1944) Luxembourg (London: H.M. Stationery Office-Naval Intelligence Division)

Edwards, K. C. (1961) Historical geography of the Luxembourg iron and steel industry, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 29: 1-16

Edwards, K. C. (1967) Luxembourg: The Survival of a Small Nation (Nottingham: University of Nottingham)

Short, J. R. (2022) The Rise and Fall of the National Atlas in the Twentieth Century: Power, State and Territory (London: Anthem Press)

Taylor, E. G. R. (1940) Plans for a National Atlas, Geographical Journal 95, 2: 96-108

Taylor, E. G. R. (1941) Land and Plan: Basic Facts Relative to a Master Plan for Britain (London: The Architect and Building News)

Taylor, E. G. R. (1945) Maps for the National Plan, Nature 155: 770

Yonge, E. L. (1957) National Atlases: a summary, Geographical Review 47, 4: 570-8

[1] Luxembourg has two independence dates: 1839, when the Great Powers recognised the Grand Duchy’s de facto independence, and 1867, when the Treaty of London ratified this arrangement.

[2] Full details can be found in the University of Nottingham’s Manuscripts and Special Collections (UoNMSC), K. C. Edwards Papers, GB 159 KCE 3/1-4.

[3] I am grateful to Catherine Delano-Smith and Rosemary Hoole for generously sharing their recollections of this period.

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A blog by David Beckingham.

Sitting between the railway station and the central areas of the city, the site of Nottingham’s former Broadmarsh Shopping Centre is a large and strategic one. The COVID-19 pandemic and the collapse of the centre’s operator intu forced the abandonment of approved redevelopment plans before they could be completed. There is now an opportunity to consider different options for the site [1].

The City Council has now secured funding to progress with demolition work [1]. A microcosm of questions about the future of many high streets and city centres, the task of deciding what to do with the site has attracted mainstream media attention from the BBC and New York Times [2]. For the practical question of what to construct from the ruins of a 1970s retail dream is also an opportunity to imagine what kind of city we might want to live in. A council consultation recently attracted record numbers of responses from members of the public [3].

Imagining alternatives can involve looking at the past, returning to old plans for the future. This blog considers two maps and a photograph from the School of Geography’s extensive collections. These show changes to the area in the period before the city street known as Broad Marsh was redeveloped into the Broadmarsh Shopping Centre.

Figure One (and title image), Ordnance Survey Plan SK5739, 1955, 1: 2500 (School of Geography Map Collection). Click to enlarge.

Figure One is drawn from an Ordnance Survey map published in 1955, with revisions up to 1953. It is notable the extent to which infrastructure and industry shaped this area of the city. The Nottingham canal moved east west across this area of the city, passing warehouses, factories and printing works on its way to the River Trent. The extensivity of railway operations can also be seen. These include the fan-like sidings and sheds west of the Midland Station, and the line of the old Great Central Railway that carried passengers northwards into a tunnel beneath Weekday Cross and on to the city’s Victoria Station (itself later redeveloped as a shopping centre).

Figure Two, Bus station and Broad Marsh (undated photograph from School of Geography archive)

Figure Two is from a set of slides in the School’s archive, which were kindly digitised in 2020 as part of a placement project at the university’s Manuscripts and Special Collections department. Though we do not know the photographer, or precisely when it was taken, the image captures a view looking north-east from New Bridge Street. It shows a number 23 Barton bus – destined for Long Clawson in the Vale of Belvoir – and buildings fronting the eastern end of Broad Marsh. These can be seen on Figure Three, an Ordnance Survey map published in 1965 based on revisions up to 1963. I have included an indicative though imprecise outline of the area affected by the shopping centre development [3]. It emphasises how the development interrupted existing street patterns. Pedestrian visitors to Nottingham would be forced through the shopping centre.

Figure Three, Ordnance Survey Plan SK5639 and 5739, 1965, 1: 2500 (School of Geography Map Collection). Click to enlarge.

A railway signal box can also be seen on the centre right of the photograph.  It guarded the junction of the former Great Central and Great Northern lines.  The Unitarian Chapel of High Pavement that dominates the photograph gives a sense of the height changes that the shopping centre architects needed to accommodate in their plans. The spot heights on the map show a gain of nearly forty feet from the bus gyratory, up Middle Marsh and Drury Hill, to Middle Pavement.

Rather than buses and trains, it is the infrastructure of the motor car that marks one of the main differences between the 1955 and 1965 maps. Maid Marian Way is marked, though not yet the elevated concrete carpark that would be projected across its approach to Collin Street at the southwest corner of the Broadmarsh centre. Education is also prominent in the area, with the People’s College of Further Education a large new edition on the western edge.

Looking at the themes of these maps, infrastructure and education are to the fore in today’s redevelopments in the area: these include a newly opened Nottingham College campus and a large library, car park and bus station complex also nearing completion. Trams also connect the railway station and the city centre, their elevated route affording views of the remains of Broadmarsh.

References

[1] My Nottingham News, Nottingham City Council, ‘Demolition of part of the former Broadmarsh Shopping Centre to begin in June’, 26 May 2021, https://www.mynottinghamnews.co.uk/demolition-of-part-of-the-former-broadmarsh-shopping-centre-to-begin-in-june/

[2] BBC News online, ‘Shopping centres face demolition after Covid’, 21 May 2021, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-57165171; Stephen Castle, ‘Nottingham’s Dilemma: Robin Hood or high tech?’ New York Times online, 16 May 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/18/world/europe/nottingham-broadmarsh-centre.html

[3] For old images and maps, and an accurate outline of the area being redeveloped, see Nottingham City Council: Broadmarsh: The Big Conversation:
https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/21c59c2e9c52410b9278230ea7828acc

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In this special blog, David Beckingham uses maps from the School of Geography and University of Nottingham’s Manuscripts and Special Collections to trace the site of Nottingham’s General Lunatic Asylum in Sneinton, now King Edward Park. It is a version of a talk David gave at an event earlier in the year to mark the completion of BACKLIT Gallery’s Heritage Lottery funded Nottingham Asylum Project [1].

Nottingham was an asylum pioneer.  The town’s General Hospital, which opened in the eighteenth century, was not set up to treat people that what were understood to be suffering from unsound mind. But in an innovative partnership, at the beginning of the nineteenth century the justices of the peace of the county and town collaborated with a group of voluntary (private) subscribers to provide a dedicated facility, which officially opened beyond the town boundary at Sneinton in 1811.

The Nottingham project reflected broader changes in understandings of mental illness, which posed that patients could be treated with a more therapeutic care regime. The geography of the asylum mattered, separating patients from their existing urban environments and networks of connections [2].

Figure 1, a map by Edward Salmon published in the 1860s, shows just how close the Nottingham site was to the expanding city (the asylum is on the middle row of map panels, to the right (east) of the pink and blue boundary lines). The map shows some of the other institutional responses to Nottingham’s urban problems, including the workhouse (upper left panel), and House of Correction (second row). Such institutions were not simply spaces to sequester problems behind high walls; like the asylum, their designs often reflected complex ideas about moral discipline and reform.

Figure 1: Detail of east Nottingham, Edward Salmon, Plan of the town of Nottingham and its environs (London: Wyld) [186-?] University of Nottingham Manuscripts and Special Collections (East Midlands Special Collections Not 3.B8.E6). Not for reproduction. Click to enlarge the image, or to view a higher-resolution version of the map, please follow the link to the University of Nottingham Manuscripts and Special Collections Digital Gallery.

The voluntary subscribers abandoned the asylum partnership in the 1850s, as overcrowding was understood to be compromising treatment. They moved their patients to a larger site called Coppice Hill in north Nottingham. This did not resolve the local pressures on the asylum site, however, and nearby baths and washhouses hint at the kinds of environmental problems that might have stood at odds with any therapeutic ambitions.  In time the city also left the partnership, constructing its own facility at Mapperley.  Finally, in 1902, with Sneinton now part of the city, the county patients were removed to a new facility on a much larger site at Saxondale near Bingham.

Figure 2: Nottingham, Ordnance Survey Provisional Edition, XLII NW 1938, 6 inches to 1 mile University of Nottingham School of Geography Map Collection. Click to enlarge.

The expanding city ultimately surrounded and overwhelmed the asylum site. Figure 2, a map from 1938 on an earlier base, hints at the changes that were remaking twentieth-century Nottingham, with space for new housing out to the west, and the University College in the bottom left of the map.  To the east of the city centre, the asylum is now King Edward Park, a rare empty space between tight rows of streets.  This can be seen even more clearly on my final map, Figure 3, a 1955 Ordnance Survey plan whose details allow us to locate the asylum site amongst Nottingham’s textile works and other places of industry.

Figure 3 (and title image): Detail of King Edward Park, Ordnance Survey Plan SK 5840, 1955, 1:1,250 University of Nottingham, School of Geography Map Collection. Click to enlarge.

If the asylum was a spatial response to urban life, designed to separate people from problem environments, then these maps show how the site and the changing urban nature of Nottingham shaped what could be done there.  In short, the asylum was not a space isolated from industrialism.  It is noteworthy that these maps show a series of boundaries: city and county; parishes; public and private spaces; diseased and healthy; freedom and control.  Maps, just like the asylum, were an attempt to order, reorder even.

Discover more about map and archive collections at the University:

University of Nottingham School of Geography Map Collection, University Park Campus: https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/geography/about/map-services/map-collection/index.aspx.  For more information, please contact Cartographic Unit Manager Elaine Watts.

University of Nottingham Manuscripts and Special Collections, Kings Meadow Campus: https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/manuscriptsandspecialcollections/. In addition to many maps of Nottingham, the archive holds printed materials relating to the foundation of the asylum.

References

[1] For more information about the BACKLIT Nottingham Asylum Project, see: https://nottsasylumproject.ucraft.site/

[2] My reading of the asylum site is informed by the foundational work of geographers Professor Hester Parr and Professor Chris Philo. See: Hester Parr and Chris Philo (1996) ‘A Forbidding Fortress of Locks, Bars and Padded Cells’: The locational history of mental health care in Nottingham (Historical Geography Research Series, No. 32).

The post Locating the Nottingham General Asylum appeared first on The Map Blog.

Are you a student or staff member or somebody who just loves maps?  

Maps in the School of Geography’s extensive collection are now searchable via the University’s library discovery tool, NUsearch.

About the collection

The School of Geography map collection is the main cartographic holding within the University and one of the largest in the East Midlands, comprising over 85,000 paper maps housed in 550 drawers.

Available to access via appointment to University staff, students and the public, the collection features noteworthy maps covering a wide range of locations and cartographic styles.

The collection includes 40,000 UK Ordnance Survey maps providing extensive coverage of Nottingham and the East Midlands, illustrating how the geography of the city, the region, and the University has changed over time.

Other maps in the collection include the UK in various historical series, geological maps, thematic maps and holdings covering Europe with notable coverage of the mid-twentieth century and the rest of the world. Highlights include WWI trench maps, various German WWI and WWII, other military maps and a Napoleonic map of central Europe.

The School of Geography collection is the main cartographic holding within the University. Manuscripts and Special Collections within Libraries also holds a range of maps, predominantly of the East Midlands, drawn from estate collections and other sources.

Searching and accessing the collection

Thanks to work undertaken by colleagues in the School of Geography and University of Nottingham Libraries, it is now easier than ever to search the collection and request an appointment.

To find a map from the collection, search for a place name or location on NUsearch and filter the search to ‘School of Geography maps’. Visit the Libraries website for full instructions.

Alternatively, you can browse all items in the collection.

From NUsearch, users can see key details of each map including the year of creation and access a full map collection inventory.

PLEASE NOTE: Catalogued information for the map collection is in text format only and does not include any images of the maps.

Access to the collection is via appointment only and users can follow a link from the NUsearch record to request an appointment.

Elaine Watts, curator of the collection and manager of the School of Geography’s Cartographic Unit said “We are thrilled to have been able to work with colleagues in Libraries to make our collection available for discovery via NUsearch. We encourage all map users from within the University and beyond to use this unique and valuable resource.”

To find out more, or to access the collection, email elaine.watts@nottingham.ac.uk

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A blog by David Matless

May 2020. The School of Geography, and its map collection, are locked down. The ‘Map of the Month’ blog is out to grass for now, but another element of the School collections has recently been restored to view, and provides the occasion for this piece. Within the School’s archive room is an extensive collection of glass slides, assembled decades ago for teaching, and including images of diagrams, maps and photographs. The equipment to view such slides is long gone, but the Department of Manuscripts and Special Collections at the King’s Meadow campus has collaborated with the School in digitising hundreds of slides relating to the East Midlands. The project has been organised and overseen by Mark Bentley at MSC, with the scanning undertaken by Nottingham Advantage Award placement students Annabel Stubbs and Rita Figueiredo, the latter a current second year geographer. We thank all those involved for opening up an aspect of the School’s history for view. For more on MSC see https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/manuscriptsandspecialcollections/index.aspx.

The photographic slides are labelled with brief details of subject and date. The photographers are not given, though were most likely members of the Department of Geography. The digitised images are clear, and zooming in reveals vivid detail. Here, in lockdown, we can ‘zoom’ to meet the past, and some of the slides show our own building, or views from close by. Neither members of the School nor other visitors can enter the building at present, but virtual history allows some reconnection to the workplace. Three images are examined, one a view from nearby Keighton Hill in 1960, several years before the building was constructed, the second a 1968 view from the roof of the new building, the third a 1967 Christmas view, shown at the head of this blog and discussed at its conclusion.

1960, from Keighton Hill

Please click on image to enlarge

At this time in a normal year people might wander from work to Keighton Hill, happy for a chance to leave the building, to take some lunchtime sun, to look over the city. The viewpoint is recognisable from this 1960 slide, taken from what was then the university Botanic Garden, but the components of the view are very different. In the distance Wilford power station smokes by the Trent, part of an industrial Nottingham since diminished; it disappeared from view in 1981, the site now the Riverside Retail Park. The University Park lake is visible, with the Lakeside Pavilion, venue for dances and concerts constructed when the campus and Highfields Park were laid out in the 1920s, at its eastern end. The Pavilion disappeared around the millennium; the current Lakeside arts centre opened in 2001. To the left of the slide is Highfields Lido, an Italianate open-air swimming pool, 330 x 75 feet, opened in 1924 and designed by Morley Horder, also architect of the Trent Building. The lido closed in 1981, standing derelict for a few years (it was possible to climb in, but the water was gone) before replacement in the 1990s by the Djanogly art gallery and the music department. The slide catches a mid-twentieth century landscape of public leisure and publicly owned industry, shaped by the local authority and Central Electricity Generating Board. Until a few weeks ago, the idea that the state might again achieve such a commanding presence seemed unlikely. Today’s view is underwritten by state support, though with prospects uncertain.

1968, from the Roof

Please click on the image to enlarge

The new Social Sciences building (now the Clive Granger Building) opened in 1967, housing the departments of geography, economics and sociology. In January 1968 someone took this view from the roof, showing a new university and city rising. The part of campus which would be colloquially known as ‘Science City’ is there, with the George Green Library and the ‘Architecture Tower’, then housing the department of architecture and in its design an expression of institutional modernity. The boiler house chimney climbs in construction. Absent for now is the Medical School, with Queens Medical Centre only built a few years later, opening in 1977. Zooming in shows Lenton Church, its tower visible between the new tower block flats off Derby Road, completed in 1967 and the sign of a housing future, which would last just over forty years. The Lenton flats were demolished from 2013. A zoom also allows inspection of the skyline, the dome of the Council House in Market Square visible, explaining why its loud ‘Little John’ bell is audible on campus, given an east wind.

At Christmas, 1967

Please click on the image to enlarge

This view of the Social Sciences building entrance is dated ‘Christmas 1967’. Perhaps someone chose to escape domestic festive confinement to visit the office. The car may be the photographer’s, driven right to the door, no bollards obstructing. The bare soil in the foreground awaits planting, but otherwise the scene is largely familiar. The front doors, locked for the season, are of a style now surviving only at the permanently locked ground floor entrance facing Hugh Stewart Hall. Zooming in suggests a full top floor noticeboard. The roof shows the weather station, where daily readings would be collected for decades.

Any reader who has studied or worked in this building will have memories of daily entry and exit, whether through key-locked doors or the automatic doors installed around forty years after this image was captured. Any current worker or student will for now only have memories. The unpopulated Christmas 1967 view matches today. For the building, at present, every day is like Christmas.

The post Workplace Views appeared first on The Map Blog.

A blog by David Beckingham

The School map collection is primarily organised by country, with drawers then differentiated according to scale and only comparatively rarely by distinctive category.  However particular types of map can be found right across the collection, and there are occasional groupings of specialist maps.  The collection contains many different travel and tourist maps, for example, of which motoring maps are a particularly distinctive category.

Many of the comparatively early maps in the collection are sponsored by motoring organisations.  These include the Royal Automobile Club Touring Department’s Bartholomew’s two miles to an inch road maps, dissected, mounted and folded. Many of these earlier maps in our collection carry the name of K.C. Edwards.  This hints at their use in fieldwork, which might also explain the presence of large numbers of Italian and French touring and motoring maps across the collection.

Figure 1, Left, selection of K.C. Edwards’s Royal Automobile Club Bartholomew’s Road Maps, c. 1920s (cupboard 10b); right, Ordnance Survey Road Map of Sheffield, c. 1924 (cupboard 11b). Please click to enlarge.

The iconography of the covers is fascinating.  Sometimes the map covers are plain and workaday, little more than a dust cover.  Others, like the Ordnance Survey covers of the 1920s, designed by Ellis Martin as the OS sought to reach a new popular motoring and walking audience, are at once modern and bucolic, conveying a geographical imagination promoting mobility and adventure in English landscape.

Two items stand out here.  The first was published by the Institut Cartographie de Paris around 1925.  The map, which can be viewed in detail online [1], is of the Briancon-Grenoble section of the Route des Alpes, a multi-day drive or cycle journey. It was partnered with a relief profile that shows the relative heights of the mountain passes and peaks, topping out at 2058m on the Col du Lautaret.  The cover (see Figure 2) shows the towering mountain of La Meije, and its glacier swathed in snowy white. It can be seen on the right hand side of this selection of French motoring maps.

Figure 2, Left, Services Automobiles de la Route des Alpes, 3e Etape, Briancon-Grenoble (1925); right, selection including Carte Routiere series, published in Paris by A. Taride, as well as Michelin maps of various ages and a Bartholomew’s set of touring maps (drawer A60 and cupboard 10b). Please click to enlarge.

The second highlight is a boxed set of Danish Automobile Club maps, with cartography by the Danish Geodetic Institute, published around 1935.  The 1:320,000 scale maps have a wonderful colour cover image of a car at a rural junction.  The use of the junction and road signs, similar to the Ordnance Survey Road Map cover shown in Figure 1, of course underscores the importance of being able to plan which direction to turn.  However it is the scenery that stands out so vividly, and not only because the box has protected these maps so well. As with the OS maps, regional and national landscape iconography helps to frame and sell the map by encouraging motoring. See Figure 3.

Figure 3, Geodætisk Instituts Automobilkort Danmark, 1: 320,000 (drawer A26). Please click to enlarge.

More famously Michelin had for many years been producing maps of France since around 1900 [2].  The collection contains items from different editions, some in a box of older French maps and others distributed throughout the France drawers.

Figure 4, Selection of Michelin maps, c. 1920 (cupboard 10b). Bibendum is swimming in the Bay of Mont St Michel, from Carte Michelin de la France, No. 9, St. Brieuc – St. Lô. Please click to enlarge.

Of course Michelin was in the business of promoting motoring.  The map details in Figure 4 date from around 1920. Bibendum, the Michelin Man, can be spotted swimming off the coast of Mont St Michel on a 1:200,000 map – a playful take on the beasts of the deep that occupy the oceanic margins of so many mediaeval maps. The back cover of an accompanying map in the 48-sheet series carries an advertisement for a Michelin illustrated guide to the battlefields of the Great War – Bibendum, now wearing a helmet, directing the visitors’ gaze across a barbed-wire landscape.

The UK maps in the collection indicate that as motoring became more accessible, and the motorway network expanded, so the sponsors of maps diversified (see Figure 5).  Alongside traditional map makers such as Ordnance Survey and Bartholomew, and organisations such as the RAC and AA, the collection also contains maps that the fuel companies Shell, Esso and Jet produced in collaboration with George Philip and Son.

Figure 5, Selection of UK motoring maps (cupboard 10b)

Perhaps keen to compete with Michelin, Dunlop tyres published with Geographia a ‘Width of Road’ series to enable motorists to plan which types of roads they would like to use on their journeys.  The Ordnance Survey’s word choice for its titles also makes it clear that road maps were not for drivers to consult when at the wheel.  Alongside planning, however, the maps could be used by passengers – though with what success is not recorded.

As well as offering an insight into the ways in which motoring has been promoted through maps, these sheets provide a useful example of a thematic way to navigate our collection.  The lack of a comprehensive catalogue for many of our drawers is certainly a challenge in such research.  Yet even this small sample conveys the value of sampling across the collection to reveal the variety of the common and unusual maps it contains.  These motoring examples also offer a particularly good way to think about how maps not only enabled mobility but themselves also travelled – on fieldwork, on a rare drive to the coast or the mountains, on an everyday trip to the shops, and ultimately to the drawers and cupboards of the Edwards Resource Centre.

[1] Paris Bibliothèques, https://bibliotheques-specialisees.paris.fr/ark:/73873/pf0001954445,

[2] The Michelin Archive, Stoke-on-Trent City Archives, http://archives.michelin.co.uk/in-depth/maps-and-guides/

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A blog by Dr Andy Cook

In November 2019, the former Czechoslovakia commemorated the 30^th Anniversary of what became known as the ‘Velvet Revolution’ – a series of largely peaceful protests that heralded the end of four decades of state socialist rule in the country. Given the significance of this anniversary, it proves useful to reflect on the complex recent history of the former Czechoslovakia, in particular upon the cartographic operations organised by the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ).

The featured map is taken from the School of Geography’s map collection and comprises a partial extract of a map titled, ‘Industry’, from the Atlas of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic [Atlas Československé socialistické republiky] published in 1966 by the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences and the Central Administration of Geodesy and Cartography. The atlas extract came into the stewardship of the School via the work of Prof. R.H. Osborne, a noted scholar of the geographies of Central and Eastern Europe, active in researching the region in the 1960s. Initial investigations suggest that the Atlas was exchanged for British cartographic materials as part of a scheme instigated by Charles University, Prague, in 1965, in order to facilitate the exchange of geographical literature between the University and academic institutions in the UK, described in a pamphlet issued at the time, the cover of which is shown here.

Exchange of Geographical Literature pamphlet, dated January, 1965. (Source: Papers of RH Osbourne, University of Nottingham)

Stylistically, as well as in terms of content, the map is of interest. The map has been designed to accentuate the economic and labour geographies of Czechoslovakia. It is does this effectively, by using a combination of bright, primary colours in the pie charts and by backgrounding the topography and political geography of the region. The size of the pie charts indicates industrial employment by settlement for all settlements with more than 50 residents and the different coloured wedges indicate the composition of industrial employment for each settlement, which can be examined on the zoomable image of the map below; the map key can be found in Footnote 1 at the end of this blog.

Map of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic [Zoomable] (Source: Svoboda and Stehlik 1966: m31)

One can also see how difficult it is to pick out national boundaries, which can initially prove confusing as Czechoslovakia bordered both East and West Germany, Poland, the USSR, Hungary and Austria. The summary commentary on the reverse of the map is provided, in English and Russian, by the eminent Czech economic geographer, Prof. Dr. Miroslav Blažek who held positions as Head of the Department of Economic Geography at the University of Economics in Brno, before moving to head up the Economic Geography unit of the Czech Academy of Sciences (further biographical information can be found in Footnote 2 below).

In terms of content, the map itself is of significant interest to the economic geographer, as it depicts industrial employment by sector, based on data collected in 1960. This was the year in which the Constitution of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic was ratified, serving to remove the more liberal aspects of the constitutions produced in 1920 and 1948. As such, it served to severely limit the federal autonomy of Slovakia, subsuming Slovakia to a more centralised form of government based in Prague. Before returning to the relevance of this, is it useful to reflect on the map from a general perspective.

The main map clearly shows a concentration of industrial employment in the key population centres of Prague, Brno and Plzeň, specialising in the production of machinery (coloured red) and on the Northern Bohemian border (near Chomutov and Most) and Ostrava, focusing on coal and lignite extraction. As can be seen, in Slovakia (South and East of the main map) there is significantly less industrial employment, aside from in Bratislava and the towns of Martin, Trencín and Košice in the far East. This is perhaps unsurprising given that Slovakia was a traditionally agrarian economy and, in 1960, only accounted for c.18% of Czechslovakian industrial employment. Indeed, writing in 1954, Harriet Wanklyn noted, in somewhat peremptory fashion that, “Slovakia is industrially backward” (Wanklyn, 1958: 297). The current border between the Czech and Slovak Republics runs diagonally, South West to North East, from the town of Břeclav near the Austrian border in Southern Moravia, to just North of the town of Čadca on the Slovak-Polish border.

Following the ratification of the 3^rd constitution in 1960, Slovakia was subject to an acceleration of investment in heavy industry, particularly in terms of arms and armaments centred around the ‘explosive triangle’ of Martin, Považská Bystrica and Dubnica nad Váhom. This was a key aspect of Soviet style industrial policy – attempting to eradicate capitalist uneven development through direct state intervention in industrial strategy. Such a policy also continued in Bohemia and Moravia (the Czech lands), especially around industrial hubs such as Ostrava, where ambitious new housing projects situated in new towns and suburbs were created to house residents working in coal mining and manufacturing, as shown in photographs within the R.H. Osborne papers here.

Newly Constructed Housing for Miners, Karviná, Ostrava, early 1960s (Source: Papers of RH Osborne, School of Geography, University of Nottingham)

These urban landscapes are characteristic features of developments in towns and cities throughout Eastern Central Europe that were instigated during the 1960s. The development of so-called panelák (panel, or prefabricated) housing during this period was an attempt to provide cheap and effective housing for towns experiencing rapid industrialisation and population growth.

The relative, so-called, ‘backwardness’ of the Slovakian territories noted previously, in terms of industrial development, is reflected on further by Blažek, who notes, “…[the] last vestiges of an uneven industrial development are gradually being eliminated”. The perceptions of such ‘backwardness’ were vital in the justification of various industrialisation programmes that were rolled out in Slovakia. These regional disparities can be seen in the inset map reproduced below, showing the ‘Degree of Regional Industrialisation’ of Czechoslovakia. The level of intensity of the coloured circles is designed to indicate the number of workers per 1,000 residents and the colour of each region denotes the number of workers per 10km2. As can be seen, in the Slovak lands, industrial workers are a smaller percentage of the population and industrial employment is less strongly concentrated.

Degree of Regional Industrialisation, Czechoslovakia (Svoboda and Stehlik 1966, m31).

Such processes were a central pillar of a number of economic plans instigated in the post-Stalinist period from 1956 onward and were strongly linked to the Cold War military-industrial complex supporting the militarisation and power projection of the USSR on the world stage. The forced industrialisation of Slovakia had significant impacts on the social and economic geography of the future Slovak Republic and by 1988, almost 30% of industrial employment in Czechoslovakia was based in Slovakia, a doubling of employment since 1948.

Following the collapse of state socialism and centralised economic planning between 1989 and 1993 that expedited the shedding of labour from uncompetitive (and newly privatised) industrial enterprises alongside concomitant failures to create new enterprises, Slovakia suffered significantly. The relative reliance of Slovakia on heavy engineering and armaments manufacturing and the strong links between the economy and CMEA (Council for Mutual Economic Assistance) meant that the collapse in demand for products impacted Slovakia more than the Czech Republic. By the mid-1990s some Slovak regions experienced unemployment rates of over 20% and employment in industry fell by 22.6% nationally between 1990 and 1994. This decline was matched by similar declines in real wages. Such patterns were mirrored in historic industrial regions, such as Northern Bohemia, where coal production and employment fell by almost 50% between 1984 and 1994. Indeed, the uneven regional impacts of the transition to capitalism could well be seen as one of the contributing factors to the dissolution of Czechoslovakia, the so-called ‘Velvet Divorce’ of 1993.

The 1966 map of Czechoslovakia acts as a window into a skein of complex biographies, of the material ‘map itself’ travelling across Europe as part of links developed between East and West, between Nottingham, Prague and Brno and as an artefact of central economic and industrial planning and the political formalisation of the State Socialist Constitution in 1960. Furthermore, the map can be used with a healthy dose of hindsight, to explore how changing industrial and economic imperatives and regimes of accumulation (Smith 1998) have had a significant impact on the actually existing economic geographies of the former Czechoslovakia.

Footnotes

[1] Key to Main Map

[2] Biographical Note: Prof. Dr. Miroslav Blažek (b. Brno, 1916 – d. Brno, 1983) was an eminent Czech economic geographer. His doctoral research was interrupted by the occupation of Czechoslovakia by Nazi Germany and was completed following the liberation of the Czech lands in 1945. It focused upon the settlement geographies of Northern Bohemia – a resource rich and geopolitically contentious region. His most influential publications were An Economic Geography of Czechoslovakia (1958) and Political and Economic Geography (1967). A review of the German translation of the former in the Geographical Journal from 1960 by Harriet Steers (nee Wanklyn; she married fellow geographer JA Steers in 1942 but published geographies of Eastern Europe under both her birth and married surnames) noted that, “Something of the distinguished Czechoslovak past in geography has been transmitted to readers of our own time”.

[3] I would like to thank Dr. Gary Priestnall for his support (and tolerance) in providing assistance with scanning the map.

References and Further Reading

Blažek, M. (1958) Hospodářský zeměpis Československa, Prague: Orbis

Heimann, M (2011) Czechoslovakia: The State that Failed, New Haven: Yale University Press

Matless, D., Oldfield, J. and Swain, A. (2007) Encountering Soviet Geography: Oral Histories of British Geographical Studies of the USSR and Eastern Europe 1945-1991, Social & Cultural Geography. 8(3), 353-372

Osborne, R.H. (1967) East-Central Europe: A Geographical Introduction to Seven Socialist States, London: Chatto and Windus

Pavlínek, P. (1998) Privatisation and the regional restructuring of coal mining in the Czech Republic after the collapse of state socialism, in Pickles, J. and Smith, A. M. (eds) Theorising Transition: The political economy of post-communist transformations, London: Routledge, 218-239

Pounds, N. J. G. (1958) The spread of mining in the coal basin of Upper Silesia and Northern Moravia, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 48(2), 149-163

Smith, A. M. (1998) Reconstructing the Regional Economy: Industrial Transformation and Regional Development in Slovakia, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar

Steers, H. (1960) Review of Blažek, M (1959) Ökonomische Geographie der Tschechoslowakischen Republik, The Geographical Journal, 126(1), p76

Svoboda, J. and Stehlik, B. (1966) Atlas of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, Prague: Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, Central Administration of Geodesy and Cartography, 58mp

Wanklyn, H (1954) Czechoslovakia, London: Phillip

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