Category Archives: Current events

Les cartes olympiques de Paris

Hosting the Olympic Games is a huge task for even the largest and most seasoned of cities, requiring years of careful logistical planning. However, hosting the Games also presents a cartographic challenge, with transport alterations and dozens of temporary venues rendering ordinary city maps inadequate for visitors. Special maps are often commissioned by upcoming hosts, allowing easy navigation by the influx of international travellers. Such event maps are ephemeral by definition, but many are preserved in our collections (you can read more about our collection of Olympic maps here).

As the XXXIII Olympiad draws to a close in Paris, we’ve taken a look back through our collection of maps made for the three Games held in the French capital to date; in 1900, 1924, and 2024.

The 1900 Olympics coincided with the Exposition Universelle, a world’s fair which attracted some 48 million visitors to Paris over a seven-month period. The Parisian publishing house Garnier Frères published this map of the exhibition sites, which clustered around a central portion of the River Seine. It features an overview map alongside four enlarged insets which show the details of the exhibition displays.

Plan de l’exposition universelle de 1900 (1900), C21:50 Paris (8)

Detail showing the Grand Palais and Petit Palais, which were built especially for the event. C21:50 Paris (8)

Foreign publishers also took advantage of the event, with Edinburgh-based W. & A.K. Johnston Ltd. publishing this map for an Anglophone audience. The Johnston map incorporates three different scales on one sheet; the exhibition sites, central Paris, and the whole of France.

W. & A.K. Johnston’s plan of Paris, and Exhibition, and map of France (1900), C21:50 Paris (14)

Detail of the River Seine, showing the ‘foreign section’ and the artistic exhibitions. The river itself hosted the Olympic rowing, swimming, and water polo events in 1900. C21:50 Paris (14)

The first operational part of the Paris Metro opened part way through the 1900 Olympics, but its rapid expansion in the following decades meant that it played a more significant role in subsequent Games. This 1922 map by A. Taride uses a red overprint on a street plan to highlight the lines that would have been at the disposal of visitors to the 1924 Olympics, incorporating the competing Métropolitain and Nord-Sud networks, which did not merge into a unified system until 1930. The centrepiece of the 1924 Games was the Yves du Manoir Stadium in Colombes, which hosted nine sports, in addition to the Opening Ceremony. However, neither the Metro system or Taride’s map extend as far north west as Colombes.

Nouveau plan de Paris avec toutes les lignes du métropolitain et du nord-sud (1922), C21:50 Paris (47)

Detail of the area around the Champs-Élysées and Place de la Concorde, showing the convergence of Metro lines. C21:50 Paris (47)

One hundred years later, the 2024 Games opened in a very different, digital world. This time, organisers have launched a specially designed mobile app which provides dynamic navigation instructions using real-time data to flexibly disperse crowds and ease congestion. Alongside this high-tech solution, the organisers have also provided an outage-proof paper map, which joins our collection hot off the press. While 2024 marks the third time Paris has hosted the Olympic Games, it is the first time that the city has hosted the Paralympic Games, with the map designed to cater for both events.

The Yves du Manoir Stadium reprises its Olympic role as the venue of the hockey tournaments, but once again does not appear within the main map frame, which only includes central Paris. However, the Grand Palais, built for the 1900 exposition, does feature; this time as the Olympic and Paralympic venue for fencing and taekwondo — as well as a cameo in the Opening Ceremony, during which La Marseillaise was performed from its rooftop.

Paris 2024 : plan des transports publics (2024), C21:50 Paris (219)

Produced by Lyon-based firm Latitude-Cartagène (which specialises in event mapping), the Paris 2024 map draws on OpenStreetMap data and, like Taride’s map, focuses on public transport. The map tackles the unenviable design challenge of combining a street plan and extensive transit map with station closure information, 17 Olympic venues, and the locations of the city’s permanent tourist highlights. With an audience travelling from over 200 countries, the cartographer’s brief is made harder by having to avoid any culture-specific conventions or language. All the while, the map must be sympathetic to the Paris 2024 branding style — an important commercial aspect of a modern Games — as well as that of the regional public transport authority, Île-de-France Mobilités. Using a pastel base map, minimal text, pictorial symbols, and a broad colour palette for the thematic content, it clears these hurdles with gold medal-worthy clarity.

Ephemeral maps

These two albums of cuttings show the progress of the First World War through the essentially ephemeral medium of maps for newspapers; being the method the ordinary person could follow the progress of the war visually.  The maps were small scale and general with a strong basic message which had to overcome the disadvantages of poor quality paper and usually small size. Arrows on the map would have covered miles on the ground!

 

 

These maps were not drawn or published to be kept, they were to describe a short period of time which would soon be superseded. In an era without 24 hour rolling news on screens everywhere, these ephemeral maps and illustrations were very important to provide context.

 

 

See this map of the Battle of Messines (7th-14th June 1917) which is in its infancy so much that the newspaper maps have yet to have a title.

Newspaper illustrators did not confine themselves to just to maps as you can see from the diorama sinking of the Lusitania. The diagram gives circumstances of the disaster which would have resonated as there were 123 Americans out of the total 1,195 lost souls.

Another example is the map Location of Mid-West Men which would have particular relevance to our trans Atlantic allies.

The Bodleian has a rich collection of  trench maps and they have been blogged about before here and here but it is interesting to compare the broad brush newspaper image with an actual published map.

 

By being a snapshot in time they provide researchers a very interesting contemporary view of the ebb and flow of the situation on the ground and not a full historical record with all the benefits of hindsight.

 

Depictions of Europe continue after the Armistice was signed until 1st February 1919.  Maps appeared afterwards concerning the changing political situation and the fate of Germany.

The scrapbooks here was bequeathed by Walter Newton Henry Harding, an interesting character and prodigious collector. The story of his vast collections and how they ended up at the Bodleian is the story for another blog but among the 22 tons of material were these two albums full of maps and diagrams cut from Chicago newspapers offering a uniquely transatlantic view.

 

Where the great battles the war in Europe are being fought. [Chicago: Various publishers], 1914-1919.  C1 b.97

True north

We are used to having north at the top of our maps. This has been the most common orientation for hundreds of years, largely because of the use of the magnetic compass. Compasses do not, however, point exactly north. The northern magnetic pole wanders around the Canadian Arctic, and anyone requiring precise direction for navigational purposes needs to keep this in mind. It is common for maps to have a diagram showing the difference between magnetic and true north, as in this sea chart from 1870 (which also includes a date for the declination and, elsewhere on the chart, the current rate of change).

The discovery that the earth’s magnetic field fluctuates, and does not line up with its geographical axis, is nothing new. European navigators were aware of this issue from the fifteenth century. Edmond Halley had begun charted the magnetic declination across much of  the world at the end of the seventeenth century, and this map by John Senex from 1725, based on his work, shows the “Line of no variation in the year 1700” curving sinuously across the Atlantic. Lines of equal declination – isogonic lines – are marked around it.

This line where magnetic and true north coincide – properly called the agonic – is also in constant motion and we recently heard the exciting news that it is about to reach the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, so compasses there will point to true north for the first time in 360 years. More information can be found here on the website of the British Geological Survey.

Olympic and Commonwealth Games maps

With the Commonwealth Games taking place on the Gold Coast and the recent donation of a map of the XIII Winter Olympics in Lake Placid in 1980 it seems a good opportunity to show some maps of various Olympic and Commonwealth Games sites from the collection.

XIII Olympic Winter Games 1980, Adirondack Region, New York, U S A, special edition metric topographic map 1980, United States Geological Survey. F6:40 (112)

The majority of maps held in the collection are designed for the visitor, and show locations with text and information, promotional items which in the earliest examples were often part of a general map of a city – such as the 1936 map of Berlin, below – though of the 11 maps held on the Olympics in London in 2012 4 deal with the planning and design of the sites. The Lake Placid games were held in the Adirondack National Park, a mountainous range in North-eastern New York State, a popular winter sports destination which had already held a Winter Olympics in 1932. The map is produced by the U.S. Geological Survey, the national mapping agency for the United States and includes insets showing the lay-outs of the separate sporting areas around the village, including the Luge and Bobsleigh, the Down-Hill course and Village and Olympic centres. 

Maps are a valuable accompaniment to exhibitions and events and the Library holds, as well as the Olympic maps shown here, maps of World  and Expo Exhibitions. The following maps are of other Olympic Games held through-out the World.

This map of the Berlin Olympics in 1936 (Stadtplan Berlin, 1936, C22:45 Berlin g.3) is an inset on a small atlas of Berlin, designed to fit into the inside pocket of a jacket. The atlas has tourist information in English, German, Italian and French and despite only being in power for three years the changes brought about by the ruling Nazi Partry can already be seen in some of the street names.  Following on from Berlin are maps of Innsbruck for the 1964 Winter Olympics (C4:20 Innsbruck (18)), a lovely depiction of the Olympic Park for the ill-fated Munich Olympics in 1972 (C22:45 Munich (45), a map from Yugoslavia for the 1984 Olympics in Sarajevo (C10 (232)) and to finish two maps of the 1960 Rome Olympics.

 

 

 

The Rome maps are fascinating because as well as having the official map shown above (C25:50 Rome (55)) we also have a map that once belonged to the film director Michael Winner, who made a film in 1970 set at the Rome Olympics about the Marathon Race. As well as under-lining in red places were filming took place on the map on the inside cover there is a list of the different locations in Rome where filming of The Games took place (C25:50 Rome d.5).