Tom Harper, Ken Field and Ed Parsons standing beneath a colossal “Target Berlin” map (you can’t see Berlin ‘cos it would have meant leaving out Tom, Ken and Ed!)
The view from the 11th floor of the Google office is stunning, would have been even better if we weren’t wreathed in fog but hey London is great isn’t it? 
FE Manning’s Target map positioned Berlin at the centre of the map to highlight its accessibility to allied bomber missions. It reminded me that there have always been political choices in what was shown at the centre of a map (e.g. the world atlas pages that show Britain at the centre), today our phones and GPS put each of us at the centre of our own personal map. 
These cartoon maps illustrate how propagandists from both sides of the war used maps to speak to their domestic audiences. 
This is a map of the Auschwitz concentration camp sent to the Foreign Office in 1944, the Jewish Agency were trying to convince the Allies to bomb the death camps – sadly they didn’t until very late (it’s a complex topic, for a summary you might look at this wikipedia article)
Time to leave the war and turn to some ‘peace’ maps. 
This is a version of the Sykes Picot map determining British and French areas of influence in the Middle east at the end of the second war. Some have suggested that the current problems in the Middle East are the fault of the map makers or are due to the uncertainty of a pencil line drawn on a map having a real world width of 2 miles. Not true, IMHO the imposition of European style nation states by the French and British and their intense, centuries long, rivalries are at the heart of current geopolitical problems in the region. For a good read on this subject take a look at A Line in the Sand by James Barr.
Deep discussion of the Sykes-Picot map at @BLMaps exhibition with @TW_Harper @edparsons @StevenFeldman pic.twitter.com/kKt0RaypW2
— Kenneth Field (@kennethfield) December 22, 2016
This Portuguese “Mapa Humoristico” is a fairly blatant piece of western propaganda showing the Soviet ‘threat’ to Europe during the cold war with the Iron Curtain elegantly represented as a fence. 
This is a piece of map art that shows a map of Europe made out of the national currencies (presumably pre Euro). Ken quipped that it could also be a prediction of Europe in say 10 years time. It reminds you how iconic the country outlines are.
Just for fun…"Europe in Britain" provokes a little #maprage at @BLMaps cc @mpdaly pic.twitter.com/24kHz13D8s
— Kenneth Field (@kennethfield) December 22, 2016
Ed is quite keen on Brexit, this map showing EU grants to the UK got him quite fired up 🙂 
This early 20th century map of Jewish East London is in the style of Charles Booth’s maps and is taken from a book discussing the pros and cons of immigration – very apposite for us at the end of 2016 (and for me as the grandson of Jewish immigrants to Britain). The colour ramp may indicate the view of the cartographer as, perhaps surprisingly, the blue areas are those with the highest population and the red are those with the lowest.
The original sketch for Beck’s first London Underground map (apologies for the reflected overhead spots)
This is the 1931 first published version of Beck’s Underground which solved the challenges of clutter in the centre of the map and produced something that was “legible, comprehensible and memorable at a glance” (Tom Harper in the book The 20th Century in Maps: Drawing the Line published by the British Library). As always Beck’s work prompted a discussion about whether it’s a map or a diagram or whether that even matters if it works. And finally …. 
Tolkein’s map of Middle Earth and Mordor carefully plotted and drawn to scale on graph paper. Apparently Tolkien used the map as an aid to calculate journey times used in the Lord of the Rings. It is an example of how a fictional map can create a sense of authority or even reality for the readers of a novel.
This is a fantastic exhibition, if you love maps you’ve got to go. If your partner doesn’t understand your fascination with maps then you should take them (could be a reason to go a second time 🙂 ). And if you really really can’t make it to the British Library then you can buy the book which has got masses of stuff that I missed on my tour.
Massive thanks to Ken for initiating the visit, to Ed for breakfast and the view over London and most of all to Tom for the guided tour.
I’ve been to the exhibition and I agree, it’s excellent. My only gripe is that there is perhaps an over-emphasis on maps related to war and military action. Even the “Peace” section might have been better entitled “The Aftermath of War”. But perhaps that’s inevitable if you are dealing with the twentieth century…..
Mapping technology and usage in the first half of the 20th century was certainly stimulated (if not enabled) by war and its aftermath