Fuzzy Britain

This is a composite of 14 representations of Britain on 14 different world maps, adjusted to scale.

Sorry, I can't do the necessary technical malarkey to shrink it down to fit properly, but you get the drift.

Ben Terrett, a graphic designer who blogs at the trendy looking Noisy Decent Graphics, created this image. He became interested a few years ago in different cartographical representations of Britain. He began with the rather standard expectation that Britain would tend to be represented rather bigger than it really is, especially on older maps, because he expected a correlation between Britain's power and importance in the world, and its relative size on maps. So far, so ho-hum. What he didn't expect was significant differences in the shape of Britain, not only in older maps but between modern maps too. Mr Terrett comments -

"If you look at all the maps (separately), they all look kind of OK. When I put them all together, it looks like madness. Like people taking liberties with the truth.”

Madness seems a bit strong...but it does seem odd. I mean, isn't this stuff supposed to be standardised by now?

Still, as the Strange Maps website, which linked to this, reminds us -

"All maps are lies."