As Ordnance Survey prepares to increase the price of their maps yet again Dave Hewitt maps the rising cost of getting out into the great outdoors.
Next Monday, 12 November, a depressingly familiar retail event comes round again - the Ordnance Survey is raising the price of its maps.
Of the three types of most use to walkers, climbers and the like, the pink-covered 1:50000 scale Landrangers are going up from £5.25 to £5.99, the yellow-covered 1:25000 Outdoor Leisure sheets from £6.75 to £6.99, and the orange-covered 1:25000 Explorers from £5.75 to £6.99.
In terms of percentage rises (sorry for sounding like an economic correspondent here but be assured that my ears don't stick out like those of Newsnight's Evan Davis), the Landrangers are to rise by 14.1%, the Outdoor Leisures by 3.6% and the Explorers by a whopping 21.6%.
This is nothing new. OS maps have steadily - even relentlessly - risen in price since before I was knee-high to a trig point. In fact the OS is predictably upbeat about its price updates, with the company's website, www.ordsvy.gov.uk currently including this statement, by Jeremy Stokes, consumer marketing manager.
"All our maps continue to offer excellent value for money," he enthuses. "We are planning further improvements to our paper map range starting in 2002 and the extra income generated by these increases will go some way to helping us fund that programme. For commercial reasons I cannot reveal details of the proposed improvements at this stage but they will involve both the content of our maps and the frequency of their updating."
There's mileage (sorry, kilometreage) in plotting the evolution of OS price rises, partly to try and establish whether maps are becoming proportionately more expensive, partly because I for one have never seen such information collated. So I'll swap the economics hat for the Watchdog one (and no, I don't look like Ann Robinson or Nicky Campbell, either) and plunge into the dusty cupboard in search of The Old Map Box, the place where my outdated sheets end up in the autumn of their years.
The earliest OS sheet I possess is the splendidly titled Popular Edition One-Inch Map of Scotland, Sheet 34, The Cuillins, Rhum and Canna. This, so its elegant cover informs me, was first published in 1947, having been based on the full revision of 1927. As to exactly when this particular edition hit the bookshops, I'll err on the side of caution and go with the "1955" scribbled on the cover by the previous owner, one M J Gallagher.
The map was printed on cloth (presumably not a cheap technique) and cost "six shillings and sixpence net". Which, if the decimal bingo I played at junior school still serves me correctly, converts to 37 1/2p in modern money.
So with that as a starting point, it's time for Exhibit B - another one-inch map, Sheet 121, covering Derby and Leicester. It dates from 1966, Crown copyright is given as 1962 but the sheet was "reprinted with the addition of Rights of Way, new major roads and Staunton Harold Reservoir 1966".
And the price? It would have set you back 6/6, exactly the same as the 1955 Cuillin sheet. In other words, the customer-cost had not increased by even a farthing over 11 years. If the OS was making any kind of commercial profit during this time, it must have come via economies in production techniques, the 1966 sheets were printed on dull old paper rather than cloth.
Exhibit C is another one-incher, near identical in design to the East Midlands one. This is Sheet 61, Falkirk and Lanark and has a latest-revision date of 1971. We are now (just) into the era of decimalisation and the cover shows a price of 44p - 6 1/2p or one shilling and fourpence up on 1966 rates. Perhaps it's more relevant to give a percentage increase - a fairly substantial 17.3%.
For the next stage I'm grateful to Phil Cooper of Lancaster, who responded to my appeal for information. He's better placed than most to comment on map prices during the 1970s and 1980s, this having been his hill active heyday. Cooper's maps saw plenty of action as, between 1976 and 1984, he racked up rounds of Munros, Furth 3000ers, Corbetts, Donalds and Welsh/English 2000ers, with a full set of county tops tacked on just for fun.
"I like to keep all my old maps in use," Cooper writes, "and have quite a number of one-inch sheets which cost 50p, the last purchased in 1978 with a 44p cover price. When the 1:50000 sheets first came in, in 1974, they cost a whacking 65p, a 30% increase on the previous product at a time of high inflation which I seem to remember peaked at 26% in 1976.
"Other 1:50000s cost me 80p in July 1975 and Jan 1976 (with a black rectangle adjacent to the price to black out the 65p originally printed), £1.15 in Dec 1976, the same in Sept 1977 and Aug 1978 and £1.40 in Sept 1979. The next maps I bought were in 1984. By then the price wasn't printed on the cover, so I can't advise any further."
Gary Westwood of Sheffield is able to take over at this stage. He sent me an OS price list ("Maps and Miscellaneous Publications - UK") from November 1980. Landrangers - the natural heirs of the one-inch series - came in at £1.75 each and this appears to have been the point when the OS stopped pre-printing the price on the map cover.
This in itself sheds some interesting - and instructive - light on the gradual commercialisation of the OS. It could be argued that by switching from pre-printed prices to sticky labels the OS have cleverly provided themselves with the scope to increase prices without necessarily providing new products.
As to more recent times, Alun-Peter Fisher from Hampshire mailed to say that Landrangers cost £4.25 in the mid-1990s and had reached £5.25 by spring 1999. So we have a reasonably complete overall picture in which the one-inch sheets nudged up from 37 1/2p in the immediate postwar period to 44p in 1978, whereas the metric Landrangers started (in 1974) at 65p, had reached £1.75 by 1980 and had steepled to more than three times that even before next week's increment kicks in. Put another way, a basic walking map will soon cost you almost 16 times as much as in 1966. That is, by any definition, a steep set of price-contours.
Of course inflation, index-linking and all manner of other fiscal realities come into play here and the real question is whether the cost of maps has grown in proportion to that of other commodities. The traditional measure of this, as Phil Cooper pointed out when he supplied his data, is the price of eggs. Another route might be to look at related hillgoing equipment - say the price of a basic compass in 1966 as against what it costs now. Any observations from readers on this theme would be of interest.
For now, though, I've chosen to run a comparison - admittedly ad hoc and unrepresentative - with the cost of paperback books. This has the advantage of easily obtained information - my bookshelves are groaning under the weight of data - while there is a peripheral connection in that both maps and books inevitably have to take heed of the costs of paper and printing.
So, after scouring my bookshelves, here are some popular paperbacks dating (approximately) from each of the various map-price eras:
Swann's Way, Marcel Proust (Penguin, 1957 edition): 6/-, ie 30p
The kind of thing you buy but don't read when you're a student
Brighton Rock, Graham Greene (Penguin, 1968): 3/6, 17 1/2p
Not to be confused with Pillar Rock, the Bass Rock or Ya Bass Rock
Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak (Fontana, 1971): 50p
Bought because I fancied Julie Christie
Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh (Penguin, 1980): £1.50
A pre-TV edition: cheery period artwork instead of Jeremy Irons' grim mugshot
Daniel Martin, John Fowles (Triad Granada, 1983): £2.50
Greatly underrated: this and The Magus I could happily read once a year
Illywhacker, Peter Carey (Faber, 1988): £4.99
Sequel to Mullwharchar, a novel about Galloway
Snow Falling on Cedars, David Guterson (Bloomsbury, 1995): £5.99
Greatly overrated: overlong, over-hyped and over here
Experience, Martin Amis (Vintage, 2001): £7.99
Best book this year, for me. Best CD? Pleased to Meet You, by James
Now, after that brief cultural review, we have a set of prices which seem to suggest that paperbacks have increased at a similar rate to Landranger maps. If anything, books used to be slightly cheaper but now the polarity has reversed. It's still perfectly possible to pick up paperbacks for less than the Amis book listed here but you won't find many below the £5.99 that a Landranger will set you back. This is interesting - and I have to confess that it undermines my initial assumption that map prices have been hiked disproportionately.
There are other factors, however. One is durability. I have only ever bought one copy of each of the books listed above, whereas pretty much all my maps - certainly those covering upland regions - are now on their second or even third version. This is occasionally due to cartographic improvements - the Landranger second series was undoubtedly way ahead of the first - but the main reason is a combination of overuse and our damp climate eating away at the untreated paper from which such products are made. Mind you, if I carted a John Fowles novel up Am Faochagach a few times then I'd probably have to replace that, too.
A more relevant aspect is that the OS always has been and remains, a state organisation. OS copyright is Crown copyright and the original connections with government and the military ("ordnance", remember) have by no means vanished. Until not so long ago OS maps were heavily subsidised by the government and this without doubt helped to keep the prices pegged.
Nowadays, though, in our shiny market economy, the OS has to earn its keep along with everything else and so the commercial managers inevitably hold more sway than they once did. It would be nice to think that an egalitarian ethic still pertains, that the price-setters lose sleep while thinking of ways to avoid bumping up the cost every couple of years but we all know that these guys don't worry about things like that.
Perhaps they should, though. After all, the OS retains a large degree of control over all UK map products, not just its own (witness the copyright acknowledgements on Harveys sheets; witness the £20 million in royalties recently paid by the AA). So with the OS maintaining a form of monopoly over the market and with the organisation having access to taxpayers' money via the public purse, surely there should be a requirement to make maps as widely available as possible.
And that doesn't just mean putting maps in more shops, it means producing maps at a price that enables, even encourages, ordinary users to buy them. We are, after all, effectively making a two-part payment every time we buy a map - once over the counter in the shop, once off our wage packets at source. As my ex-boss recently observed, "I await the first story when someone gets lost and claims they didn't have a map because they couldn't afford it".
Of course all the above relates to Landranger maps. The larger-scale Outdoor Leisure and Explorer sheets also merit examination. Phil Cooper recalls having bought an OL sheet in 1978 for £1.90 and reckons these initially appeared around 1974 at £1.15. By 1980 they were £2.15 and they reached £4.50 in 1991, then £5.40 in 1996. Next week they rise to £6.99 - a hefty sum but considerably less, comparatively, then the Landranger leap since 1974.
More worrying is the Explorer situation, especially as these are being touted as the future of OS mapping (although if anyone knows how an Outdoor Leisure sheet differs from an Explorer other than the colour of the cover, please let me know). Explorers are steadily replacing the old Pathfinders, the aim being to have the whole of the UK covered by 2003. A few test-the-water Explorers came out during the 1990s, and Alun-Peter Fisher recalls one of these, the erstwhile Sheet 13, as having cost £4.50.
Next week's massive leap from £5.75 to £6.99 is annoying enough but there's also an all-too-familiar aspect to this. The Explorers have been rolled out south-to-north, with recent editions having reached the Highland fringe. But what about people north of there, who must now shell out the new price - 21% more than Welsh, English and southern Scottish customers - for their Explorers? Surely it isn't right for the OS to be changing the rules before the whole country is covered? Surely Explorer prices should have remained fixed until the full set was available in two years time?
The last such lopsided pricing imposition prompted poll tax marches and rallies in George Square. Will Explorergate similarly catch the mood of the nation? Probably not but a flurry of wider debate would provide a useful distraction from Henry McLeish's expenses, if nothing else.
As for me, the burgeoning OS coffers make me feel uneasy, even angry - and asking Highlanders and hillgoers to pay even more for their maps smacks of blatant injustice. I can't see me chaining myself to the Ordnance Survey's railings over it, though.
Dave Hewitt
8/11/2001
