Our survey says... [mapping the built environment

Abstract

Maps, apart from helping travellers, could also be powerful weapons. All maps in the Soviet Union carried deliberate errors to mislead mysterious Western spies with purposeful paranoia-driven deviations. There were no mistakes - deliberate or otherwise - in the Soviet cartographers' military maps of the West; the Maps of the 20th century exhibition in the British Library holds a 1980s map of Brighton as a possible nuclear strike target, describing every single dwelling, warehouse and workshop in minute detail.