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From here to the future, in maps

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Times Staff Writer

“EVERYTHING happens somewhere” would be a good motto for the Ordnance Survey, Britain’s premier mapmaker since 1791 and now a leader in computerized map resources and their astounding 21st century applications.

The organization, a self-funded agency of the British government, devotes itself to improving modern life through the use of maps and stands as proof that the study of geography is alive and well -- in England, at least.

Americans who have heard of the Ordnance Survey (www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk) -- so named because it began as part of the British military -- may know it because they have gone walking in England, Scotland or Wales using one of the organization’s 470 Explorer series maps. Designed on a scale of 1:25,000 (which means that 2.5 inches on paper equal a mile on the ground), the Explorer series is incredibly detailed, showing footpaths and public rights of way, Roman walls and telephone booths.

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Ten years ago, I used the bestselling Ordnance Survey Explorer map of the glorious English Lake District to find my way from the town of Keswick to the hamlet of Buttermere, where I knew I would find a telephone because the map told me so.

Walking and the Ordnance Survey go sock in boot. When Parliament passed a law in 2000 opening new areas to the public, the organization began revising Explorer maps to reflect them. The massive remapping project is to be completed in March.

Maps fascinate me, so when I had the chance to visit the Ordnance Survey offices, I jumped. From its founding in the late 18th century, when the island nation desperately needed maps to defend itself, until 1841, the organization was in the Tower of London.

It quickly outgrew the tower and moved to Southampton on England’s southern coast, where it occupies a huge, maze-like complex built in the 1960s. At that time, the Ordnance Survey had a staff of about 3,000, but computerization has streamlined the mapmaking process, so it now has about half the staff and plans to move to smaller quarters by 2008.

It still produces millions of paper maps a year for outdoors enthusiasts and vacationers. But in 1973, the organization began computerizing its stock of 230,000 map sheets, a 20-year process that resulted in the unveiling of a massive, state-ofthe-art geographical database known as Mastermap.

The information embedded in this digitalized English uber-map is constantly updated -- about 5,000 changes are incorporated a day -- and can be customized in remarkable ways for licensing to corporations, researchers, planners and government agencies.

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With it, for instance, supermarket, hotel and department store chains efficiently assess the best locations for new outlets. Retailers identify households that might be receptive to marketing campaigns. Engineers are better able to plan construction projects, knowing where underground utility pipes are. Local governments calculate how much time and money it would take to mow the grass on public land. And emergency rescue services can quickly and efficiently reach people in trouble, thanks to the Mastermap’s ability to pinpoint 26 million residential and commercial addresses across Britain.

I’m still trying to understand how cartographers devised a way to show a spherical world on a flat map many years ago, so I couldn’t hope to fathom mind-boggling Mastermap in a day’s visit to the Ordnance Survey.

When I arrived, I was relieved to see a display in the lobby featuring a few things I could understand, such as a segment of the first hand-drawn Ordnance Survey map of Kent, so detailed that it aggravated secretive country farmers who didn’t want the boundaries of their fields made public. There was also a huge, heavy 18th century theodolite, a surveying device that had to be carried from place to place by a small platoon of soldiers.

These days, field surveyors use high-tech computerized pens instead of theodolites, producing information supplemented by aerial photography, or photogrammetry. Ordnance Survey photogrammetric surveyor Jean Martin showed me photos taken from two Cessna 404s that use a new, eight-lensed Zeiss digital mapping camera. I could easily make out features as detailed as trees, parking spaces and the white boundaries of tennis courts at Wimbledon.

“The chaps here really love the pictures of football stadiums,” Martin said.

Her explanation of how photogrammetors convert information from the pictures into digitalized maps was way over my head. I felt back in a world I could understand only when I visited the cartography department, full of real paper maps instead of virtual ones. The old-fashioned art of cartography has made a comeback as cartographers find more attractive and user-friendly ways to visualize geographical information.

After that, I grabbed lunch with British-American senior research scientist Chris Phillips, who explores potential applications of the Ordnance Survey database right out of science fiction. One of these is Zapper, a hand-held global-positioning-system unit linked to Mastermap. When pointed at a building or geographical feature, it instantly provides an assortment of information, including restaurant menus, hotel rates, opening hours for tourist attractions and real estate prices.

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Phillips thinks global-positioning satellite technology has reawakened interest in geography. GPS scavenger hunts, or “geocaching,” are attracting increasing numbers of devotees, though they might think twice about their favorite pastime when “GPS: The Movie,” a thriller about a geocaching quest gone desperately awry, arrives in theaters later this year.

In England, the Ordnance Survey has tried in the last three years to foster geographical awareness by distributing 3 million free maps to 11-year-olds. The organization hopes the schoolchildren will take the maps home, encouraging families to take an interest.

The English seem to have a special affinity for maps, geography and exploration. Ordnance Survey Chief Executive Vanessa Lawrence, whose interest in geography was launched by an elementary-school teacher, told me it stemmed partly from the English educational system, which values the study of geography.

Then, too, Britain is a small nation, which makes it eminently mappable.

“You can drive from north to south in something like 24 hours,” Lawrence said. “So we have data at a post-office-box level the U.S. Geological Survey can’t maintain.”

After my visit to the Ordnance Survey, I took out my old English Lake District Explorer map and easily found the telephone from which I called home a decade ago. The phone booth is still where it used to be. That’s good to know.

Susan Spano also writes “Postcards From Paris,” which can be read at latimes.com/susanspano.

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