Putting people on the map 

‘Which places in the city are important to you?’ was the question we have been posing through our ‘Click into place: Mapping Our Exeter’ project. 

This began back in November 2022 when we took part in the Being Human Festival. Joining forces with our friends at the Devon and Exeter Institution, we put on an exhibition of some of the historic maps of Exeter which the two collections contain. These date from a facsimile copy of Hooker’s 1587 map of the city to a 1970s city plan. In between these two maps, it is possible to trace the growth and development of Exeter (see our digital exhibition).  

Maps, though, are things which are made of a place, not by the place and we wanted to extend our collection by ‘commissioning’ a new, digital map which represents the city as the people who live, work or visit it see it. So, on that dreary November morning, we invited visitors to place a pin on a Google map of the city and to record why it was important to them. 

The contributions were diverse. For some people, it represented the opportunity to record an historic site, to remind everyone of what had happened on a particular spot. For others, their choice was determined by a personal memory – where they married or worked for example – and for some of our younger visitors, it was a case of marking places that they played. 

By the end of the morning, we had a fair few contributions – and remarkably interesting ones at that – but we were aware of the limitations of an event on a cold Saturday morning in the city centre and so we began to investigate how we could extend our audience and find out about what other places were important.  

Our first port of call was to some older people’s lunch clubs. Here, we spent time talking to visitors about their memories of the city – of places where you could buy a cheap lunch, of pubs long since gone, of buildings demolished to make way for progress – and added some fascinating memories to the map.  

Then we were invited to a community group in Countess Wear who were looking to create a parish walk and asked us to go along and talk to people at their drop in event. About 80 people attended that morning, many with whole chunks of local history to deposit. We found out about early modern ship building and family firms which had passed down through the generations and how people used to play on land which is now a dual carriageway.  

Back at the university, we set up shop in the main library to engage students, whose special places revolved around their leisure activities and the experience of life at an institution a long way from the town or city (or even country) where they had been born and bred.  

Our latest contributions have come from local Cub Scout groups. As well as adding their special places to the new map, we organised activities using our historic maps, asking them to put them in chronological order and to find specific things on the maps as well as creating a map of their own area which highlights the things that are special to them. Their enthusiasm and engagement were great as they worked together to try and decide which was the earliest map and which the most recent and as they tried to spot their house and school on the more modern plans. 

The idea is that this new map will be preserved as a record of people’s thoughts about the city, once we have garnered as many contributions as we can. It will sit alongside a digital exhibition of our historic maps and will form part of the history of ‘our’ Exeter. And if you are part of a group who would like to contribute to the map and find out more about how Exeter has changed over the centuries, please get in touch at libspc@exeter.a.cuk. 

Sarah-Jayne Ainsworth