Lines Shape Imagined Journeys

The first of its kind, European mapmakers quickly imitated this strip map atlas of England and Wales created by Royal Cosmographer, John Ogilby. Strip maps depict journeys as straight lines, just like a smart phone app provides navigational directions. The orienting points on the map are not north and south, but instead the journey’s start and end. Ogilby’s guidebook targeted growing interest in road travel, introducing viewers to the “flourishing kingdom” by providing them with a bird’s-eye perspective of an imagined journey. But to do so, Britannia rotated the cardinal directions on each roadmap and prioritized each map’s line over accuracy in the roads’ shape.