Mapping Britain: The Story of an Island through the Ordnance Survey Archives

by Will Millard, Ordnance Survey

Discover the story of Britain as you've never seen it before through the extraordinary archive of Ordnance Survey

Ordnance Survey has been the home of British mapmaking since 1745, when a twenty-one-year old engineer was first tasked with a small-scale military survey of Scotland. Since then, its maps have borne witness to nearly three centuries of phenomenal transformation, from the British Empire to the Industrial Revolution, World War I to the digital era, and are still trusted and treasured by millions of us today.

In Mapping Britain, Will Millard brings the illustrious Ordnance Survey archive to life in a fully-illustrated story of Britain that explores what these maps can tell us about where, why and how we have moved around this island over the centuries. We find disappearing villages, secretive smuggling paths, top-secret military plans and even the detailed maps of Buckingham Palace gifted to Queen Victoria on her fiftieth jubilee.

Rich, rewarding and endlessly fascinating, Mapping Britain is an unmissable record of how our landscape has changed - and how it might do so in the future.

Genres: Nonfiction

251 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 1, 2026

About the author

Will Millard is a best-selling writer, ghost-writer, and broadcaster based in South Wales. Will specialises in writing about extraordinary humans and the natural world, for both adults and children. His first book 'The Old Man and the Sand Eel' followed his wild journey in pursuit of a fishing record and his latest, 'The Way of the Hermit', was written with Ken Smith, who has spent four decades alone in the Scottish Highlands. Will has written for numerous magazines, newspapers, and websites, including BBC News, The Daily Telegraph, Vice, The Guardian, Geographical, Fallon’s Angler, and Country File Magazine. He is also a BAFTA Cymru winning BBC presenter, with his international series 'Hunters of the South Seas' and 'My Year with the Tribe' seeing him live alongside remote indigenous peoples of the Pacific, plus numerous other documentaries on fishing, urban exploration, history, and rivers.

Reviews

[AVS · Rating 0.25 out of 5]

I wanted this to be amazing but it is badly written, the maps are often very small so you can’t enjoy them properly and the text is not even justified. It reads more like a light TV documentary script than a proper book. I didn’t feel as though the author was an expert in anything he was saying. A real shame.