Gillian Tindall, writing a review of the Bristish Library exhibit London: A Life in Maps in the TLS (2007-01-19 p.13) asks,
In what does the essential quality of location lie, when it can be utterly transformed?
In thinking about Halifax: Warden of the North, the bush of 1749 has been shaped into streets and buildings. Even if the streets bear the same names as they did when laid out by the Royal Engineers, their character, appearance, and uses are utterly different. The bars and brothels of Water Street became warehouses and the warehouses became tourist shops or have been replaced by waterfront condos. So, when I wish to map the location of a building or an encounter or a riot or a celebration that Raddall describes in his book, I can determine the physical location, but what else do I need in order to make the tag significant?
Digression: As a poor first-time tourist in Paris, I purchased a second-hand Blue guide—arguing that the things I would be interested in (e.g. Notre Dame, the Louvre, the Sainte Chapelle) had been there for centuries and therefore a few decades made no difference. What I had not anticipated was that I should stumble across some of the events which the writers of 1949 thought significant, but which were strange to me. I remember sitting in a café in a small square and reading that (in August 1944) a bloody skirmish between the Resistance and the Germans had taken place on this square, and that bullet holes could still be found in the walls of the public building just opposite. I spent some time searching the walls of this building—which seemed freshly cleaned—but no bullet scars remained. I was disappointed. That field of urban combat would have been real for me in a more immediate way if I had been able to see a mark that I could trace precisely to that historical instant.
This kind of mapping requires a kind of triangulation: a point in space, a point in time, and to unite them, an observer (in this case either the writer of the book or the reader). But in addition, the point in space must belong in some significant way to that historical point in time, it must, ideally be the trace of that historical moment. The text with its GPS coordinate tag, the physical point in space and the identifiable point in time (marked with its own tag) must in some sense be locked in a necessary bond. The text to point out and to tell the story of that place and that time.
