Reviews: The atlas of Britain and Northern Ireland

Summary

The Atlas of Britain and Northern Ireland (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963) is a national atlas compiled and published privately by a group of Oxford and Cambridge geographers. The review examines the atlas's stated aim of providing a comprehensive, balanced cartographic record of Britain's physical, economic, social, and demographic resources in the mid-twentieth century, and assesses its internal organization and content. The atlas contains several hundred maps grouped into nine thematic sections—relief and geology, coasts, climate, water, vegetation and forestry, agriculture and fisheries, industry, demography, and transport/communications—supplemented by regional map sets and a general map section. The reviewer pays particular attention to the demographic section, which uses proportional circular symbols, with continuous signs for towns and interrupted signs for rural districts, but lacks a population density map. This cartographic method succeeds in showing major population concentrations and depopulation around large centres such as London, Birmingham and Glasgow, while also marking towns created after 1951. However, the employment maps are deemed one-sided and incomplete, since no full occupational structure is given and one map covers only men. Other demographic maps often illustrate housing, retail turnover, taxation, and administrative boundaries rather than strictly demographic phenomena. Although transport maps are more interesting cartographically, the overall presentation of economic and demographic phenomena remains too simple and does not generate the comparative generalizations promised in the introduction. The reviewer concludes that the atlas is a useful and many-sided historical document of Britain around mid-century, but not a milestone in cartography.