Modern explorer Nicholas Crane travels across eight maps that changed the face of Britain in a series of geographical challenges through some of today's wildest landscapes, telling the story of British mapmaking from the time of Chaucer through to the current generation of cyber-mappers.

It is an icon of London, a design classic printed on everything from t-shirts to baseball caps, but the Underground Map started with one man working in his bedroom. Harry Beck was an electrical engineer. In 1931 he realised that his circuit diagrams were a perfect model for a new map of the underground network. Nicholas Crane travels the tube to discover how he did it. Why did he exclude everything at street level and what dictated his choice of colour for each line? Show less