In the heart of Bloomsbury, deep in the bowels of the UCL geography department, down corridors floored in institutional linoleum, sticky and scuffed by generations of students, is a room full of maps. Hundreds of thousands stacked on top of each other, tidied away in sliding wooden drawers that march to the ceiling. But not only maps: there are shelves groaning with atlases, guidebooks and Baedeckers; an entire annexe given over to hundreds of wall charts. In fact, almost every conceivable way you might orient yourself on the globe, or make legible any geographical phenomenon on paper, is represented here. It’s a cartophile’s delight; an obsessive compulsive’s nightmare.

The keeper of this horde – strictly speaking, the UCL Map Library – is James Cheshire, Britain’s only professor of cartography. With his neat, trimmed beard and steady gaze behind thick-rimmed glasses, he looks every inch the scholar-explorer – stick him in puttees, and pop a pith helmet on his head, and he might have stepped out of a H. Rider Haggard novel.

Cheshire first became aware of UCL’s Map Library while he was finishing his PhD. But he only began seriously rooting about inside it a few years ago. What he found entranced – and appalled – him. Once, almost every university geography department in the country had a facility like it. Now, UCL’s is one of the few remaining, and it had essentially been abandoned since its long-time librarian, Anne Oxenham, retired in 2001. By the time Cheshire came to it, its vast corpus of material was all-but-uncategorised. He sought to bring some order to the chaos.

‘It was quite the feat of endurance,’ he tells me. With the help of some of his students, he started to sort the collection. His favoured method was to mount a ladder, wodge his arms around a shelf of material in a drawer, jump and let fly: the older maps, typically printed on heavier, better-quality paper would thump straight down, while more recent reprints would snowstorm across the room. He expected to discard the majority of what he found. Instead, he found himself in possession of a unique archive – a place that charts a discipline that finds itself right at the centre of things once again.

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Put simply: maps are back. After all, few tools are as useful to a strongman leader. Putin’s foreign policy can partly be understood as an attempt to make real the hazy notion of Russkiy mir: a map of the greater ‘Russian world’ that Putin........

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