Or why maps are not always to be trusted
You think you know where you are with a map, don’t you? Hopefully in a very literal as well as a figurative sense. We’re going to mess with your mind here… <whispers> Not everything you see on maps is real!
We recently heard about ‘paper towns’, which are, as you might expect, towns, streets or areas that can be seen on a map but do not exist in reality.
Also known as ‘fake towns’, ‘phantom settlements’ and ‘bunnies’ (no, we aren’t sure why either), paper towns are made up by map makers in order to catch out copycat cartographers (try saying that while you’re drawing a map). The idea being if you add a fake town to your map and then you look at a map drawn at a later date by someone else and it includes the town you made up, you’ll be able to prove they copied your work. Sneaky!
There is, we are told, a Moat Lane marked on the Tele Atlas Directory of London (the basis for Google) which is entirely made up. And it’s not the first time Google has unwittingly copied a fake entry from a map onto its own map of an area.
Back in 2008, there was a flurry of interest in a town called Argleton in West Lancashire. A trawl of the internet turned up all kinds of businesses, land for sale and more, but there was a hitch… Argleton did not exist. If you went to the spot where it was marked on Google, there was nothing to see but a rather uninspiring field. When it was brought to Google’s attention they issued an apology for the ‘error’ and the town disappeared from its maps in 2010. But somewhere, someone was having the last laugh at his or her little joke (and the knowledge that Google had chosen their maps to use).
Suggestions were made that Arlgeton was an anagram of ‘not large’ or even ‘not real’ with a ‘G’ added for ‘Google’. Who knows if that’s true, or just a delicious coincidence, but we’ll be studying our Ordnance Surveys more carefully in future for suspicious-sounding towns that ring no bells.
If you also love a map, don’t miss our November issue in which we meet cartographer Kevin Sheehan who creates traditional, hand drawn maps like the one pictured here. Each is a work of art in its own right.
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