The Ordnance Survey has announced that the triple alignment of true north, grid north (on OS maps) and magnetic north—the so-called three norths—has left England and is now over the North Sea. It’ll make landfall again in Scotland late next year. This is an artifact of, and specific to, Ordnance Survey maps, whose grid has a meridian is two degrees west longitude, east and west of which there is some difference between true north and grid north, and the movement of the north magnetic pole. In other words, the third north is product-specific. The triple alignment has been working its way north for the past three years; see my previous post for more.
Tag: north
Map Men on Why North Is Up
The latest episode of Jay Foreman and Mark Cooper-Jones’s all-too-infrequent series Map Men looks at why north is at the top of modern maps, and features examples of maps where this was, or is, not the case, and why.
For something a bit more … academic, see Mick Ashworth’s Why North Is Up: Map Conventions and Where They Came From (Bodleian, 2019).
Previously: The Origins of North at the Top of Maps; The Idea of North.
What Do You Mean, Three Norths?
The Ordnance Survey is making a small deal over a so-called “triple alignment” of true north, magnetic north and grid north early this month: “the historic triple alignment will make landfall at the little village of Langton Matravers just west of Swanage in early November and will stay converged on Great Britain for three and a half years as it slowly travels up the country.”
Now, grid north is an artifact of a map projection’s grid lines. On a map grid there’s always some difference between true north and grid north except along the central meridian, which in Ordnance Survey maps is two degrees west of Greenwich. The further away from that central meridian, the greater the difference.
What the Ordnance Survey is hyping is that magnetic north, which is constantly shifting, has moved to a point where magnetic declination (the difference between true north and magnetic north) is zero along that central meridian. Kind of neat—if you’re using an Ordnance Survey map. Because this particular triple alignment only exists for Ordnance Survey maps. It’s all a bit anglocentric, really (especially the bit in the video that describes true north as “the line which runs through Britain to the North Pole”).
The Idea of North
Thony Christie explores the question of why north is at the top of modern maps by looking in detail at medieval and early modern maps, which had no consensus. “I think that the re-emergence of the Ptolemaic world map at the beginning of the fifteenth century and the development of modern cartography that it triggered which eventually led to the dominance of north orientation in mapmaking, perhaps combined with the increased use of the magnetic compass.”
The Origins of North at the Top of Maps
BBC Future’s Caroline Williams explores the following question: why do modern maps have north at the top? “Given such a long history of human map-making, it is perhaps surprising that it is only within the last few hundred years that north has been consistently considered to be at the top.” Early European maps had east at the top (orientation is derived from orient, or east); Islamic maps faced south. When maps changed to north-at-top is difficult to pinpoint, or at least the article has difficulty in doing so, but it came relatively late in history. (Thanks to Denis Dooley for the link.)