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BBC4 on the Ordnance Survey - fascinating! What was that music?

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Rigid Raider 10 Sep 2015
Did anybody see this BBC documentary on the Ordnance Survey? It was excellent and just reaffirmed everything I love about maps. But what was the great Soviet anthem at 40:57?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b06b36q3/timeshift-series-15-2-a-very-...

 Trangia 10 Sep 2015
In reply to Rigid Raider:

I found it a fascinating documentary, particularly the fact that the USSR had detailed maps of all our military installations which had been left off the OS maps for security reasons! As the commentator said, all the Soviets had to do was buy our OS maps and look for the blanks on them, before filling them in from satellite surveillance.

"Here be dragons" didn't fool them

Not certain about the music but it was reminiscent of a tune from "Gladiator"?
 goose299 10 Sep 2015
In reply to Rigid Raider:

What a fabulously geeky looking show
I know what I'll be watching tonight
 LittleRob 11 Sep 2015
In reply to Rigid Raider:

Thanks for the heads-up on that. Watched it last night and really enjoyed it. The kids think I'm a 'map nerd', but in comparison to some of the interviewees I think I have it under control.

LR
 mountainbagger 11 Sep 2015
In reply to Rigid Raider:

I didn't watch it, but it could be Vangelis, Conquest of Paradise:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/1492-Conquest-Of-Paradise-Vangelis/dp/B001F3WRJ8/re...

Listen to track 2.

I remember hearing something years ago I really loved that sounded a bit like a soviet anthem and spent ages looking for it until I found it.
Rigid Raider 11 Sep 2015
In reply to Rigid Raider:

That's the music, thanks. So Greek, not Russian!
 Toccata 11 Sep 2015
In reply to Rigid Raider:

Loved the hidden names in cliffs. I found four in the cliffs south of Isle of Wight (as shown on the documentary). Anyone know of anymore?
 Rob Naylor 13 Sep 2015
In reply to Trangia:

> I found it a fascinating documentary, particularly the fact that the USSR had detailed maps of all our military installations which had been left off the OS maps for security reasons! As the commentator said, all the Soviets had to do was buy our OS maps and look for the blanks on them, before filling them in from satellite surveillance.

It was a bit more than that!

See:

http://www.wired.com/2015/07/secret-cold-war-maps/

A short quote from that site:

In Chatham, a river town in the far southeast, a Soviet map from 1984 showed the dockyards where the Royal Navy built submarines during the Cold War—a region occupied by blank space on contemporary British maps. The Soviet map of Chatham also includes the dimensions, carrying capacity, clearance, and even the construction materials of bridges over the River Medway.

So not just satellite surveillance, but "boots on the ground" too.....and this is normal on most of their maps for western Europe, so there must have been a *lot* of boots on the ground.

I love contrasting these Soviet maps with the ones I had to use in Russia, which are deliberately distorted *on top of* the normal distortions you get in map projections, unavoidable but accounted for. The additional distortions are not easy to model.

 DaveHK 13 Sep 2015
In reply to Rigid Raider:

The artists signatures on sections of cliff have made it through into the digital age. Bill, Mike and co are all there near Blackgang Chine on the Isle of Wight. I'll be keeping an eye out for that elsewhere.
 nufkin 13 Sep 2015
In reply to DaveHK:

The artists signatures on sections of cliff have made it through into the digital age.

I heard somewhere that putting little idiosyncrasies in maps was sometimes deliberate, to protect against copyright issues
 DaveHK 13 Sep 2015
In reply to nufkin:

> > I heard somewhere that putting little idiosyncrasies in maps was sometimes deliberate, to protect against copyright issues

I did wonder if they were copyright traps but if that level of detail had been used without permission it would be obvious anyway.

I'm not aware of OS using copyright traps but supposedly Rand Mcnally were not above putting fictitious small towns in!
In reply to Rigid Raider:
Great programme - thanks for flagging it up.
 Martin W 17 Sep 2015
In reply to Trangia:
> I found it a fascinating documentary, particularly the fact that the USSR had detailed maps of all our military installations which had been left off the OS maps for security reasons! As the commentator said, all the Soviets had to do was buy our OS maps and look for the blanks on them, before filling them in from satellite surveillance.

old-maps.co.uk has soviet maps from the 1980s available. Comparing them to the OS maps is interesting. For example, Chatham dockyard is shown in detail on both the OS 1:10,560 plan of 1967-1970 and the OS 1:10,000 plan of 1970-1976. If the soviets had got hold of that latter map (which I don't think would have been all that difficult - AFAIK six-inch maps were readily available, albeit at a price, for people like surveyors and town planners to use) then that would have given them a very useful starting point for their own 1:10,000 map, to which they could add changes observed by satellite surveillance and, as Rob Naylor pointed out, useful information collected by "boots on the ground".

On the other hand, Chatham Dockyard is definitely missing from the 1961-1962 1:10,560 OS map (and the 1898 one, in fact). I suppose it's possible that old-maps.co.uk have access to fully digital versions of the more recent OS Maps which aren't redacted. (I can't remember when the programme said that the OS started digitising their maps but I imagine it would have been around the late 60s/early 70s.) Older OS Maps on that site are, I believe, based on high resolution photographs/scans of printed map sheets.

Looking at the maps on the National Library of Scotland site http://maps.nls.uk/index.html - which definitely are scans of printed maps - the dockyard does appear in detail on the six-inch OS maps on the 1930s. So it looks as if it came and went over time, possibly re-appearing even during the cold war.
Post edited at 08:35
 Dom Whillans 17 Sep 2015
In reply to Rigid Raider:

nice find and a great programme... except that the narrator didn't seem to understand the difference in pronunciation between "ordnance" and "ordinance"; it was driving me nuts by about half way through! suppose that's what you get for being taught to navigate by ex-army bods
 Trangia 17 Sep 2015
In reply to Dom Whillans:

> that the narrator didn't seem to understand the difference in pronunciation between "ordnance" and "ordinance"; it was driving me nuts by about half way through! suppose that's what you get for being taught to navigate by ex-army bods

Yup, that really niggled me too


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