Help me decipher an old annotated map of the UK

January 23, 2018 2:34 PM

A friend has gifted me (a cartophile) his grandfather's 1935 map of London and South-East England. His grandfather has annotated the western half with blue and orange lines and I can't, for the life of me work out what they are - please help! More inside.

As far as I can tell the blue and orange lines (higher res version here) do not seem to denote the borders between anything obvious. On two occasions they follow county boundaries (see here between Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire just south of Princes Risborough and here between Buckinghamshire and Hertfordshire just south of Leighton Buzzard) and on one occasion they follow the River Hamble as it joins the Solent just south of Southampton. They converge in a semi-interesting fashion just south of Windsor Great Park. Other than that the lines are broadly straight and do not follow roads/railways/other man-made objects or contours/rivers/other natural objects.

My initial thoughts were that they could be one of the following: boundaries between water boards, postal districs, diocese (or similar), parliamentary constituencies (though poss. too big), council districts (or similar), school boards or ley lines. Initial research has been rather inconclusive and I'm hoping someone here might have some bright ideas!

I don't know a huge amount about my friend's grandfather other than that he was likely a schoolteacher based in/near Lewes, East Sussex, and was likely a Quaker.

posted by muthecow to Travel & Transportation (6 answers total)

I had an idea that they might be electric companies, which were pretty much all municipally owned at that point and the initial evidence was pretty good but I think Petersfield would have been in a separate zone from Portsmouth.
posted by biffa at 3:53 PM on January 23, 2018

Just random ideas that might jog research ideas...

- What kind of work did he do?
- What hobbies and interests did he have?
- Volunteer or religious groups?
- Politics of the era...
posted by stormyteal at 4:35 PM on January 23, 2018

Did he own a bicycle or a car? To me, they look like day trip route plans. Do they end in nice places to have picnics or at a pub?
posted by kjs4 at 8:07 PM on January 23, 2018

I wondered about civil parishes, but I don't have a good reference for Hampshire to be able even to meaningfully compare over time.
posted by Emperor SnooKloze at 11:39 PM on January 23, 2018

Best answer: I grew up in this area, and to check out historic county boundaries I checked https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/business-and-government/counties/. I'm afraid the solution is not particularly exciting - the blue lines are rough approximations of county boundaries of the time. The blue boundary on the smaller image is a simplified version of the county boundary of West Sussex (which is the bottom-right area, with Surrey to the north and Hampshire to the west). I don't think they are day trip route plans; the distance is huge for walking, and they don't follow roads so you couldn't cycle. Whether in the 1930s or today, the route would take you over a patchwork of farmer's fields, it'd be a nightmare; a route for hiking would be marked on smaller-scale maps that showed footpaths. On the larger photo, the blue boundaries are still close to those OS 'historic county' boundaries. I don't have a source for the orange lines, but I suspect they're just the boroughs of 1935.
posted by askmeaboutboardgames at 5:13 AM on January 24, 2018 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Many thanks, it does indeed look like they correspond to the historic county boundaries and sadly aren't markings to hidden treasure piles. I've played around a bit more on the Ordnance Survey website and it looks like the orange lines broadly correspond to local districts.
posted by muthecow at 6:54 AM on January 24, 2018