Mapping the way? Maps, emotion, gender

Let me take you on a journey. Not as deep as that of Michel de Certeau (1984) through New York, certainly, but I will attempt to portray one of my everyday practices of space. From my house, to the west of Oxford, I will walk us into the centre of the city, noting the maps that we pass. inside the house there are several: ordnance survey, street atlases, bits of maps printed out from the internet, an atlas and – somewhere – copies of old maps. leaving the house, we pass the car (which contains a road atlas of britain, an a-Z and some ordnance survey maps of other parts of the country). We pass other cars and homes, which undoubtedly contain maps. We continue approximately 300 metres to the end of the street, where we turn left onto one of the arterial routes into Oxford. We walk for around 15 minutes, passing 12 bus stops, each with a schematic map of oxford’s bus routes. We also pass several ‘you are here’ maps: the first near the station, another by a car park and finally one by the Odeon cinema. In the space of approximately one mile we have moved from my house to the centre of oxford: in doing so, we have passed at least 23 maps, 15 of which were on public display, intended to aid everyday navigation.