Steffan Meyric Hughes has a thing for Google Earth. In his quirky and charming book Circle Line: Around London in a Small Boat, issued in the U.S. in paperback last week, he is casual but clear in revealing the profound impact of the satellite image mapping technology on his thoughts, words, and actions.
“Looking out of the train window every day as I crossed the river, then spending days gazing at the city in plan using Google Earth,” he writes in chapter one, “I realized that, with the help of a two-century-old canal system and a small boat, it should be possible to sail and row around London, to float at less than walking pace through the magnitude of the city and view it from the perspective of its days of manufacture and commerce…As a stay-cation, it would be the ultimate.”
Despite his characteristically British understatement, the motivation to embark on this journey goes much deeper than a desire for an inexpensive holiday. His intimate relationship with the online mapping application and its shaping of his outlook and goals, combined with a Luddite urge to circumnavigate his city in a dinghy boat within a modern urban context, reflects a broader wanting on the part of so many of us.
Addicted to the connectivity of smartphones, we also worship at the church of do-it-yourself craftsmanship. We want to roll up our sleeves and get our hands dirty (or wind-whipped and wet, in Meyric Hughes’s case) without sacrificing the ease and convenience of technology. His relatable desire to have it all -- the embodiment of the powerful bird’s-eye-view of high-tech cartography, along with the nostalgia he celebrates as an editor of Classic Boat, a British magazine devoted to traditional vessels -- pulls us into his adventure.
About midway through his ten-day trip, he ties his dinghy up next to a pub in the “toy suburbia” of Willowtree Marina on the edge of the city -- a place that looked “just as flat as it had on Google Earth, functional and surrounded by gridwork of new brick houses, each with a drive and new car outside.” There he meets a fellow boater named Adam, and the two exchange tales. Three pints of cider later, he’s “delighted that Adam hadn’t, when he learned of my trip around London, asked the most unanswerable question: why?”
It isn’t until the book’s conclusion that Meyric Hughes really wrestles with that question:
“I realised much later I was also trying to make sense of the place I call home, trying to immerse myself in my own context…You don’t have to sail around London to feel its immensity…there are entire districts that I’ve never heard of…places like Dollis Hill, as strange as the moon, still leap out from the pages of maps to remind me how little I know of the place I call home. I see them on the tube map and wonder who would want to live there. What is life like there? What do they do? Why don’t they live where I live?”
When he sails past an historic cemetery, he ponders the lives of thousands of "notable dead, a striking number of them naturalist explorers, astronomers, railway engineers and mathemeticians -- creatures of a century of exploration of everything, from science to the world itself," concluding that "present-day questions seem to be more about ourselves: where we came from, who we are, why we are."
While those philosophical questions are really nothing new, we constantly create and absorb novel ways of trying to answer them. Upon hearing of Google Earth for the first time, most people type in their home address and zoom in, beyond borders of continents, countries, states, towns, and streets, down to the very house where they may have grown up. Two years after the tsunami that devastated Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant, visitors to Google Maps can now roam virtually through the streets of a contaminated, abandoned town. Like Meyric Hughes, we use mapping technology to try to understand our own lives and the lives of others.
By indulging our curiosity and making sense of the layers of our physical world, we feel as though we can contain, even control, it. Since the creation of classical atlases, cartographers have portrayed their work as a science: accurate and definitive. As we know from studying centuries of world maps -- like the one “coloured Empire pink,” as Meyric Hughes points out -- each one is culturally, and even personally, subjective in its selectivity and perspective. Google Earth, with all of its environmental data and analysis, offers a more democratic and accessible approach to mapping, which explains its allure to Meyric Hughes and so many others.
On his travels around London by small boat, he explores where in the world he is. Through converging impulses to consider his surroundings from afar and up close, he finds orientation and grounding with only water beneath him. Through his book, we better understand not only the history and geography of a city, but that of a psyche, as well.
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