eighteenth-century cartography. Its members had emphasised the importance of accurately surveying the ground from scratch using the most innovative methods and sophisticated instruments available, and the competition had cemented the one-inch scale as the standard for county maps. It has been claimed that the improvement of English county surveying in this period could ‘without much doubt be traced to the offer by the Society of a prize of £ 100’.
When the Society of Arts decided to close its competition in 1802, it was because it had been superseded by the Ordnance Survey. Although it would be a military establishment that was ultimately responsible for creating Britain’sfirst national mapping agency, the Ordnance Survey’s ambitions and methods owed not a little to the traditions of civilian county surveying that had fuelled the Society of Arts’ competition. That contest’s progenitor, William Borlase, had been remarkably prophetic in his hope that such an event would prompt the government to instigate a national surveying programme. And in the meantime, between the opening of the Society of Arts’ competition and the foundation of the Ordnance Survey, a number of other developments were also involved in the gestation of Britain’s national mapping agency.
I N 1763 W ILLIAM R OY had signed the lease on his first London property , a four-storey brick residence on Great Pulteney Street, a small thoroughfare in London’s fashionable West End on which both General Wade and Paul Sandby had once lived. Sixteen years later, in 1779, he upgraded, and moved a few streets further north to a handsome modern townhouse on Argyll Street, a road running parallel to Regent Street, in a quarter set aside for military officers. Today, a blue plaque marks the house that belonged to ‘the founder of the Ordnance Survey’, but its interior has changed beyond almost all recognition. Roy had used the fourth floor as an observatory and this entire storey has been demolished and replaced with an elaborate fire-escape. Offices now orbit a central staircase that spirals up to a radiant stained-glass ceiling and the ground floor is currently leased out to the clothing chain French Connection: an amusing serendipity, for, as we shall see, one of Roy’s greatest contributions to the earth sciences was a measurement conducted between the Royal Observatory at Greenwich and the Paris Observatory, a different sort of ‘French Connection’. The Argyll Street house has not shrugged off all traces of its map-minded proprietor, however. A few years ago, the property’s current owner prised open a bricked-up fireplace to discover, stashed away for around two hundred years, a presentation copy of Roy’s Military Antiquities of the Romans in North Britain.
Roy’s lease of these prestigious quarters indicated a shift in his emotional landscape. In 1767, his brother James, who had been a Presbyterian ministerin East Lothian, died. His elderly mother was still alive, living in Lanark, and Roy paid her a visit every few years, but London was gradually replacing Scotland as the map-maker’s home. Its clubs and societies were the focus of Roy’s perambulations around the capital. He was a committed and active member of the Society of Antiquaries, which was based at the site of Robin’s Coffee-House on Chancery Lane until 1780, when it moved to Somerset House on the Strand, near the Royal Academy of Arts. In 1812 the satirical cartoonist George Cruickshank drew a caricature of ‘the Antiquarian Society’ that conjured up the rambunctious atmosphere of its meetings: in this print, greying sages confer in cabals with the utmost sincerity about items of dubious authenticity. A figure on the far right of Cruickshank’s picture , attired in a natty red military jacket, with a pocket stuffed full of papers marked ‘Ordnanance [ sic ] Affairs’, looks covetously at a Roman vase in the middle of the table. It has been suggested that this
When the Society of Arts decided to close its competition in 1802, it was because it had been superseded by the Ordnance Survey. Although it would be a military establishment that was ultimately responsible for creating Britain’sfirst national mapping agency, the Ordnance Survey’s ambitions and methods owed not a little to the traditions of civilian county surveying that had fuelled the Society of Arts’ competition. That contest’s progenitor, William Borlase, had been remarkably prophetic in his hope that such an event would prompt the government to instigate a national surveying programme. And in the meantime, between the opening of the Society of Arts’ competition and the foundation of the Ordnance Survey, a number of other developments were also involved in the gestation of Britain’s national mapping agency.
I N 1763 W ILLIAM R OY had signed the lease on his first London property , a four-storey brick residence on Great Pulteney Street, a small thoroughfare in London’s fashionable West End on which both General Wade and Paul Sandby had once lived. Sixteen years later, in 1779, he upgraded, and moved a few streets further north to a handsome modern townhouse on Argyll Street, a road running parallel to Regent Street, in a quarter set aside for military officers. Today, a blue plaque marks the house that belonged to ‘the founder of the Ordnance Survey’, but its interior has changed beyond almost all recognition. Roy had used the fourth floor as an observatory and this entire storey has been demolished and replaced with an elaborate fire-escape. Offices now orbit a central staircase that spirals up to a radiant stained-glass ceiling and the ground floor is currently leased out to the clothing chain French Connection: an amusing serendipity, for, as we shall see, one of Roy’s greatest contributions to the earth sciences was a measurement conducted between the Royal Observatory at Greenwich and the Paris Observatory, a different sort of ‘French Connection’. The Argyll Street house has not shrugged off all traces of its map-minded proprietor, however. A few years ago, the property’s current owner prised open a bricked-up fireplace to discover, stashed away for around two hundred years, a presentation copy of Roy’s Military Antiquities of the Romans in North Britain.
Roy’s lease of these prestigious quarters indicated a shift in his emotional landscape. In 1767, his brother James, who had been a Presbyterian ministerin East Lothian, died. His elderly mother was still alive, living in Lanark, and Roy paid her a visit every few years, but London was gradually replacing Scotland as the map-maker’s home. Its clubs and societies were the focus of Roy’s perambulations around the capital. He was a committed and active member of the Society of Antiquaries, which was based at the site of Robin’s Coffee-House on Chancery Lane until 1780, when it moved to Somerset House on the Strand, near the Royal Academy of Arts. In 1812 the satirical cartoonist George Cruickshank drew a caricature of ‘the Antiquarian Society’ that conjured up the rambunctious atmosphere of its meetings: in this print, greying sages confer in cabals with the utmost sincerity about items of dubious authenticity. A figure on the far right of Cruickshank’s picture , attired in a natty red military jacket, with a pocket stuffed full of papers marked ‘Ordnanance [ sic ] Affairs’, looks covetously at a Roman vase in the middle of the table. It has been suggested that this
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