Secret Maps at the British Library reconsiders the lines that shape our world

Maps do more than show us where we are or help us find where we need to go. They are powerful cultural documents, reflecting – and often shaping – the values, priorities and secrets of the societies that create them.

This lesson is brought to vivid and sometimes unsettling life in the British Library’s new exhibition, Secret Maps, which draws on more than 100 remarkable items to trace the long and tangled history of mapping as a tool for both revelation and concealment.

From hand-drawn naval charts presented to Henry VIII, to the satellite data hoovered up by our smartphones, the exhibition explores how, across centuries, maps have given form to power, plotted imperial ambitions, and encoded anxieties about security and privacy. But it also shines a light on how maps have empowered communities, memorialised injustice and contested official narratives.

One of the most striking themes of Secret Maps is the use of cartography as an instrument of state secrecy. Many of the earliest items on display were never meant for public eyes: confidential maps of the English coast commissioned for Tudor monarchs, closely guarded charts of “secret” trading routes by the Dutch East India Company and classified military plans for the D-Day landings. The shaping of knowledge was, and often still is, an act of geopolitical strategy.

A particularly evocative display pairs an 1876 map of Dover stripped of its military details for public consumption with a “secret” version, replete with every casemate (a fortified gun emplacement) and hill.

As one panel explains, such acts of omission, deliberate or otherwise, “reflect accepted priorities”. When official cartography leaves blank spaces, it can signal what those in power would rather not acknowledge publicly, or risk falling into enemy hands.

Maps in conflict and protest

State secrecy is only part of the picture. The exhibition moves through the maps used to anticipate or orchestrate conflict. There are projected atomic attack plans for cold war London, clandestine surveys of military posts during the 1926 general strike, and maps of prison sites that are rarely officially recognised. One contemporary exhibit, a quilt made by inmates of Bullingdon Prison, visually and symbolically places the prisoners “back on the map”. It’s a striking refusal to be rendered invisible.

Secret Maps also highlights the dual nature of mapping in social movements. While some communities have had to fight to be mapped at all, Kibera in Nairobi, for example, has long appeared as a blank space on government maps due to its informal settlement status. Others now find themselves surveilled and exposed by new forms of cartographic data, such as through smartphone location data collected by apps including many digital transport tickets. The transition from omission to unwelcome documentation – particularly through community mapping and digital tracking – raises profound questions about power, visibility and autonomy.

Perhaps the most relevant questions raised by Secret Maps concern the intersection of mapping technology and personal privacy.

In a world awash with smartphones, bank cards and travel passes, our movements are continuously logged and mapped. As one exhibit panel observes: “Every day, we unknowingly trade privacy for convenience.” These “secret maps” of our movements are bought, sold, and used to target us in ways most of us never fully grasp. It’s a modern paradox in which the act of mapping becomes both empowering and intrusive.

Crucially, the exhibition doesn’t treat these as merely problems of technology, but as questions of agency. Maps have always both granted power and threatened it, depending on who controls the data, the scale and the narrative.

Secret Maps is at its best when inviting us to reflect on these paradoxes. One central claim, echoed across several displays, is that: “Maps shape perceptions, empowering some while disempowering others.” What is included or excluded is rarely neutral. From colonial land surveys used to dispossess Indigenous peoples, to the “gay-friendly” city guides and Indigenous countermaps (that promote perspectives, knowledge, and rights in opposition to the colonial or state cartography on display), maps have always marked the battle lines of legitimacy and erasure.

The exhibition does not shy away from difficult topics. Maps tracing the infrastructure of apartheid, or those produced to facilitate war or surveillance, sit alongside playful artefacts such as the iconic Where’s Wally? books. The effect is to remind us that all mapping, whether for adventure, statecraft, or protest, is fundamentally about control: who gets to see, who gets seen and who decides.

A rare glimpse behind the lines

With loans from the British Library’s archives and other national collections, the exhibition offers a rare glimpse into how states historically used maps to control knowledge and project power. But it also foregrounds resistance. Community memory projects, counter-mappings, and the growing use of open-source tools reveal what authorities would like to hide.

As lead curator Tom Harper remarked during the opening of the exhibition: “Mapping has responded to the human desire to explore and define our world but can also be used as a tool of concealment.” Secret Maps succeeds in making tangible these tensions, showing how the map, ostensibly a neutral record, is always, in fact, a site of contest.

Secret Maps isn’t just about the maps that reveal or keep secrets, it’s about how those secrets shape our shared and private lives. It’s a timely reminder that every map is as much about power, memory, and identity as about topography or direction.

Whether you are a curious citizen, a student of history, or a digital cartographer, this exhibition offers an essential lens through which to reconsider the lines that shape our world.

Secret Maps is at the British Library in London until January 18 2026.

Looking for something good? Cut through the noise with a carefully curated selection of the latest releases, live events and exhibitions, straight to your inbox every fortnight, on Fridays. Sign up here.

This article features references to books that have been included for editorial reasons, and may contain links to bookshop.org. If you click on one of the links and go on to buy something from bookshop.org The Conversation UK may earn a commission.

Doug Specht does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.