By far the most compelling and visited component of the Cradle of English website, at least until we launched our Crane Court prototype immerzeo, was the home page map itself. The idea was simple enough, and still needs a lot of developing, but the history of the creative heartland of London could scarcely be told better than by distinguishing the key historical functions of the City and showing them via a series of filters: this one for the printers, that one for the pubs & taverns, another for the World of Law, and so on. It’s a tribute to the cultural richness of London’s Fleet Street, recognised globally as the traditional home to the newspaper industry, that we are four years into our project and we still haven’t got to Journalism, nor indeed to Coffee Houses.

This month sees the activation of Google Maps on our home page, presenting us with an excellent opportunity to compare the traditional benefits of maps as they have existed for a couple of thousand years, and imagine where they might evolve as they “go digital”, becoming more data-rich in the decades and centuries to come.

Maps in their traditional, two-dimensional livery have beguiled explorers, travellers of all ages, and students of culture and history since the days of drawings on cave walls. They have appealed to human curiosity from all manner of perspectives, seldom as well enumerated as on the “Mapshop” website with its “10 Reasons why maps are important” (judiciously sub-edited):

• Maps give inspiration: think outside your own world; expand your horizons
• Maps give stories context: they are orienting machines in a wider context of time, place, and theme
• Maps make you happy: particularly in the planning of a journey that pre-supposes arrival
• Maps connect you to your memories: enabling many happy returns to a place visited even just once
• They provide a blueprint of history, offering a social snapshot of earlier perceptions of a place in time
• They engage you with a wider environment than occurs with GPS, which grounds you in a single spot
• Maps save lives, where you can read them. Digital signals in remote areas are not always reliable.
• Life skills acquired: maps support and encourage spatial thinking – useful in science and mathematics
• Maps are more broadly useful, about more than just getting from A to B – so understanding the world
• Simplicity: as visual representations of complicated data they are the pictures worth 1,000 words.

What does Google Maps add to the mix? Simply put, and in a word: immersion. The panopticon cameras that render those 360° vistas confer more of a sense of being in a specific location. Where a place has evolved or vanished over time, you can click on the site of Thomas Paine’s printer for example and, via Google Maps, get an immersive sense of how that place looks today. And in this lies an indication of where cartography of the future could most intriguingly go. Imagine maps that do more than range across dimensions of space, and incorporate the changing of time too.