Forgotten in a dusty room at University College London (UCL), hundreds of drawers held a quiet argument against the idea that everything worth knowing can live on a screen.
That room — a long-neglected map archive with 440 bespoke drawers — became the unlikely workplace of James Cheshire, UCL’s professor of geographic information and cartography. Over three years, Cheshire sifted, identified, and catalogued materials that had slipped from institutional attention, assembling 96 “lost” maps into a new book, The Library of Lost Maps (Bloomsbury Publishing). Part treasure hunt, part cultural history, the volume makes a clear case for why physical maps still matter in an era dominated by digitized data.
The selection ranges across time periods and terrains, from fragile sheets that threaten to crumble when handled to prints that look startlingly intact after decades away from light. Among the most arresting examples are a map of Hiroshima printed only weeks before the atomic bomb was dropped; a map of Madrid used during the Nazi invasion of Spain; and a chart of the ocean floor that reads like a portrait of an unseen world. Cheshire frames these objects not as quaint relics, but as evidence of how societies have recorded power, knowledge, and ambition — and how easily that record can be mislaid.
Cheshire’s own research background in spatial data analysis and visualization shapes the book’s emphasis on maps as instruments of thinking, not merely navigation. One early discovery was one of only 34 copies of the first map to depict the geology of the entire Indian subcontinent, created by Victorian mapmaker George Bellas Greenough. Cheshire notes that Greenough was “one of the first to see the potential for maps as something more than a way of showing people where to go,” and the scale of the undertaking is underscored by the fact that Greenough’s initial sketch took more than a decade.
The book does not romanticize the analogue at the expense of the digital. Cheshire acknowledges the practical and scholarly advantages of digitized map data: it is widely accessible for teaching and research, easily updated, and less materially wasteful. “The world I inhabit, as a mapmaker, would have been inconceivable to most of the generations before me,” he writes, situating contemporary cartography within a technological leap that has transformed how information is gathered and shared.
Still, Cheshire is emphatic that new tools will not make maps obsolete. Asked, in effect, whether artificial intelligence will replace maps altogether, his answer is an “emphatic no.” Maps, he argues, remain central to public life because they can translate complex systems into legible evidence: they provide “the basis for campaigns for cleaner air in cities,” and they can “shame the wealthiest about the carbon footprints of their private jets.” In other words, maps do not simply describe the world; they can pressure it.
That political charge comes into focus in Cheshire’s discussion of diplomacy. He points to the US negotiation in the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, where the right map could alter the terms of debate itself. “An ethnographic map could radically change the perspective of the statesmen involved in the assessment of the trade-offs required in the negotiations,” he writes, underscoring how cartography can shape what decision-makers believe is possible, fair, or inevitable.
The Library of Lost Maps also advances a broader claim about libraries and archives as keepers of sociopolitical memory. In a culture of presentations and screen-based briefings, Cheshire suggests, something is lost when people are invited only to view data rather than handle it — to feel scale, trace borders, and register the physical labor embedded in a document’s making.
During a visit to the National Postal Museum in Washington, DC, Cheshire wonders why there is not an equivalent institution devoted to maps. The question lands as more than a passing thought. If maps “have it all,” as he suggests — history, politics, science, and design — then the fate of a forgotten map room at a major university becomes a cautionary tale, and his book a timely reminder: the paper record still has work to do.
The Library of Lost Maps is published by Bloomsbury Publishing (384 pages, more than 100 color illustrations), priced at £30 (hardback), and published October 9, 2025.
