In production

The Atlas

Every spread is one claim about a place, made twice. Once by somebody who had never seen it from above, and once by a machine that cannot see anything else. Then a verdict, and a line saying what would change it.

A finished atlas spread. On the left, a full-page lidar relief plate of Old Sarum in Wiltshire, overlaid with the National Grid and a locator showing where in Britain it sits. On the right, a survey sheet: a detail plate of Maiden Castle, an elevation profile, the same ground lit from four separate sun angles, and the claim Lidar shows what is on the ground, marked Contested on a five-point scale.
Plate 01, as it will print. Old Sarum on the left, Maiden Castle on the right. Both rendered by us from Environment Agency lidar, Open Government Licence v3, at four azimuths.

What is on a page

Most map books present. Some visualise. This one adjudicates, and it carries the same five confidence labels as the books, so a reader can see where we landed before reading the argument.

Established

The evidence supports it and the argument is closed.

Candidate

Plausible, incomplete, and worth the next season of work.

Contested

Specialists disagree, and both cases are printed at length.

Refuted

The claim as stated does not survive its own numbers.

Unverified

Nobody has checked, and we say so rather than guess.

Every number on the page was measured

The scale bar, the elevation legend, the grid reference, the vertical exaggeration on the profile: all of it is read back out of the same elevation raster the plate was rendered from, not typed in afterwards. The build refuses to print a plate below 300 dots per inch, refuses to print a claim about one place beside a picture of another, and marks itself a draft if any image on it is not cleared for a book we sell.

The elevation data is the Environment Agency lidar composite at one metre, published under the Open Government Licence. You can download the same tiles and check the plates yourself, which is the only reason to trust them.

Two editions

Standard edition

AMAZON, WORLDWIDE

8.25 x 11 in, colour throughout, paperback

Printed on demand, so it never goes out of stock

GBP 24.99

The whole book. Every plate, every verdict, nothing held back.

Collector edition

THIS SITE ONLY

270 x 340 mm, section sewn, slipcased, numbered and signed

Offset, printed once against confirmed orders

To be set with the edition size

The same book on a larger sheet. Because the scale is fixed by the data, a bigger page does not print the same ground larger, it carries more ground at the same fidelity: 71 per cent more on the detail plates.

No publication date, because the work behind it is not done. The atlas is a few spreads into a book that needs dozens, and the reproduction rights for the historical maps are still being traced. When a date is real it will appear here, and not before.

The collector edition is printed once, against orders, and offered to the advance readers first. Join them and you will hear about it before anyone else.