big maps – The Map Room

The Big Map of Kent’s South End

Published on 5 September 20259 September 2025 by Jonathan Crowe

Jennifer Mapes created a large corkboard map to illustrate the history of Kent, Ohio’s South End, a neighbourhood inhabited by railroad workers, immigrants, and African Americans moving north during the Great Migration.

I purposefully created this project as something that could be done cheaply, as a form of “analog” GIS, where students are asked to think spatially and consider how regional and national history played out in their own community. I am particularly interested in showing South End kids how the people who lived in their current homes contributed to Kent’s past.

The map is 60″×60″ and includes 350 3D printed transparent houses representing 25 different house styles in Kent’s South End. I’ve wired the map to light up based on answers to questions about the history [of] each house’s resident based on census records.

The map is currently on display at the Kent Free Library.

The World Turned Upside Down and Other Globes: A Roundup

Published on 22 July 202522 July 2025 by Jonathan Crowe

The World Turned Upside Down, a 13-foot globe sculpture by Mark Wallinger, on the campus of the London School of Economics, surrounded by a few passersby with cameras. The globe shows political borders; the South Pole is at the top. Photo by Geoff Henson, used under a Creative Commons licence. — Geoff Henson (Flickr). Creative Commons BY-ND licence.

Mark Wallinger’s World Turned Upside Down, a 13-foot globe on the LSE campus with the South Pole on top, generated controversy (and vandalism) after its unveiling in 2019 for how it handled contested borders: it shows Lhasa as a capital, Taiwan as a separate country, and omitted Palestine. I mean, it’s on a university campus: controversy about such things was inevitable. Via Mappery; more at Atlas Obscura and Brilliant Maps.

Mappery also points to a 19th-century globular clock that shows the sun’s position at noon on the globe, which I find awfully intriguing, which is to say I want one.

The Library of Congress is changing how it stores its rare globes, replacing acrylic vitrines (heavy, bulky, and potentially off-gassing compounds that put the globes at risk) with archival cardboard cases, which are less sexy but more practical—we’re talking about storage, not display. I’m actually surprised that rare globes had essentially been stored in display cases.

Large Wool Map of Ireland Seeks New Home

Published on 17 July 202517 July 2025 by Jonathan Crowe

The Journal: “A 12ft by 11ft wool map of Ireland, which took four years of knitting and crocheting to complete, is in search of a new home to go on public display.”

The Ocean Map

Published on 13 June 202513 June 2025 by Jonathan Crowe

The National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, London has a new attraction. “The Ocean Map is a giant, 440m² floor map that turns our view of the world inside out. While most world maps focus on countries and continents, the Ocean Map is all about water.” You can probably see where this is going: the Museum’s floor map uses the Spilhaus projection. Here’s a preview from before the hall in which it’s situated reopened on June 7:

The Lake District in Lego

Published on 16 January 2023 by Jonathan Crowe

BBC News has the story of Jon Tordoff’s 100-square-foot scale model of the Lake District, which he built during lockdown out of LEGO pieces.

The Challenger Map Re-Emerges; Fundraising Campaign Under Way

Published on 25 January 2022 by Jonathan Crowe

The iconic Challenger map—a 26×24-metre exaggerated relief map of British Columbia made of nearly a million pieces of jigsaw-cut plywood, is now on display at the B.C. Sports Hall of Fame as part of an exhibition on the early days of the Pacific National Exhibition, where the map was on display between 1954 and 1997. This is only for a few months; its appearance part of a fundraising campaign to restore the map.

Previously: Challenger Map Gets Reprieve; Challenger Map Update; Another Challenger Map Update; Challenger Map Back on Display, Sort Of.

The Indigenous Peoples Atlas of Canada’s Giant Floor Map Comes to PEI

Published on 1 November 2021 by Jonathan Crowe

Remember the Indigenous Peoples Atlas of Canada’s giant floor map? Measuring eight by eleven metres and created by Canadian Geographic Education (which has a lot of giant floor maps), it notably lacks provincial borders and names. It recently made its way to the University of Prince Edward Island’s education program, which occasioned this story for CBC News.

Previously: The Indigenous Peoples Atlas of Canada’s Giant Floor Map.

Esri’s New Giant Globe

Published on 26 July 2021 by Jonathan Crowe

“When you are a global Geographic Information Technology company with a globe in your logo, you don’t shy away from the opportunity to have a great big glorious 8.5-foot diameter illuminated rotating globe in your new office building. But what sort of globe cartography do you design? How should this gigantic model of our lovely home planet appear?” John Nelson and Sean Breyer explain the design and construction process behind Esri’s new globe—a custom Earthball manufactured by Orbis World Globes.

Bharat Mata Mandir Marble Map of India

Published on 22 April 2021 by Jonathan Crowe

I was unaware of Bharat Mata Mandir temple’s map of an undivided India until Mappery pointed to it. It’s another one of those giant relief map installations, only this one is made of marble; it sits in the temple in lieu of an idol. India is shown undivided—i.e., it doesn’t show the post-partition boundaries—because the temple was built in 1936.

Restoring the Grand Canyon Relief Model

Published on 20 February 202020 February 2020 by Jonathan Crowe

A large relief model of the Grand Canyon, created by Edwin Howell in 1875, has resided in the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Science Hall since 1980. The History of Cartography project’s offices are also in Science Hall. Lindsey Buscher, an editor on that project, wanted to include a photo of the relief model in the forthcoming fifth volume (which covers the 19th century), but the model was in too rough a state to be photographed. So they hired a professional conservator to restore the model: the results can be seen above. Now not only will the model’s photo be in the book, it’ll be on the cover. [Tom Patterson]

The Indigenous Peoples Atlas of Canada’s Giant Floor Map

Published on 14 January 201914 January 2019 by Jonathan Crowe

Indigenous Peoples Atlas of Canada Giant Floor Map — Canadian Geographic

As I mentioned in my post about the Indigenous People’s Atlas of Canada, the atlas project includes the four-volume physical atlas, an online version, and teaching resources that include a giant floor map from Canadian Geographic. CBC News has more about that giant floor map, which at 11 × 8 metres is so big that it has to be displayed in the gym when it’s taken on tours of schools. See also this video.

Previously: Map of Indigenous Canada Accompanies People’s Atlas; The Indigenous Peoples Atlas of Canada.

Giant 1940 Model of San Francisco Digitally Assembled

Published on 10 January 2019 by Jonathan Crowe

A massive wooden model of the city of San Francisco that has not been on display, at least in one piece, since 1942 has been re-assembled as a virtual model by the David Rumsey Map Collection. Built by the WPA, the model was assembled from 158 individual pieces to form a massive, 42×38-foot (12.8×11.6m) model at a scale of 1:1,200, and represented a snapshot of the city as it was in 1940. It’s available as a single composite image, as well as images of individual pieces; a Google Earth layer enables the model to be viewed at an oblique angle and superimposed on modern satellite imagery. Sections of the model itself will be on display at various branches of the San Francisco Public Library as part of Bik Van der Pol’s Take Part project; the exhibits will take place between 25 January and 25 March 2019. [Boing Boing]

Previously: Urbano Monte’s 1587 World Map, Digitally Assembled.

Restoring a 150-Foot Map of Australia in the English Countryside

Published on 15 November 2018 by Jonathan Crowe

During World War I, Australian troops staying at nearby Hurdcott Camp carved a gigantic map of Australia into a Wiltshire hillside. Chalk gravel was used to fill shallow trenches to create an outline map some 150 feet wide with 18-foot-tall letters. Since then, despite a restoration in the 1950s and its designation as a Scheduled Ancient Monument, the map has faded, but for the past four years the Map of Australia Trust has been working on restoring the map. It was finished in time for Armistice Day. More from BBC News (video) and Historic England. [Jonathan Potter]

Sarah Spencer’s Giant Star Map Tapestry

Published on 16 September 2018 by Jonathan Crowe

This huge star map tapestry is the work of Australian maker Sarah Spencer, who created it by hacking a 1980s-era knitting machine. Yes, this thing was knitted: it apparently took more than 100 hours and 15 kg (33 lbs) of (locally sourced Australian) wool to produce this 4.6×2.8-metre (15×9-foot) monster, which is accurate (with the caveat that an equatorial projection distorts familiar circumpolar constellations) and reasonably detailed: the constellations are labelled and the stars’ apparent magnitude is indicated. Space.com has the story. [Boing Boing]

FDR’s Globe

Published on 20 April 201820 April 2018 by Jonathan Crowe

Franklin D. Roosevelt being presented a globe by the U.S. Army at the White House in Washington, D.C., December 1942. Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library.

Earlier this week I told you about President Kennedy’s map of Cuba. Now here’s a piece on President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s globe from the Library of Congress’s map blog.

The “President’s Globe” is big—really big and important. Weighing in at a whopping 750 pounds and sized at an impressive 50 inches in diameter, the globe was specially designed for President Franklin D. Roosevelt for use during World War II. The massive representation of the earth helped the president gauge distances over water to allocate personnel and material in support of the war effort against the Axis Powers of Germany, Japan, and Italy. This feat of cartographic history was given as a Christmas present to the president in 1942, and he placed the globe directly behind his office chair, often referring to it during his workday.

Lots of interesting detail in this piece. Three globes were made, under the direction of Arthur Robinson (yes, that Robinson) who during the Second World War directed the map division of the OSS: the other two went to Winston Churchill and General George C. Marshall. Roosevelt’s globe is now at his presidential library. [WMS]