The return of the paper road map

We live in strange times, where things are dumped, deemed out of date, and then somehow they come back. There is the well-charted return of vinyl records of course, but then more esoteric things like the return of board games. Where people sit in the same room, opposite each other and, like, play a game and even talk and stuff. And now it’s road maps.

We don’t need fold-out paper maps that catch in the wind, that get eaten by the dog and always have your destination on a fold. Instead we have smartphones and sat nav systems that bark commands at us and then, mysteriously, tell you you’re at your destination which is apparently a bridge over a river.

For those tired of being told what to do and who want to take command of their journeys again, Ordnance Survey has resurrected and modernised its range of nine OS Road maps. These are designed to help motorists navigate around not just the road system but the country and its attractions as well.

They fold up into the glovebox, like a sat nav sliding down into the dashboard. They need no power. They suffer from no outages or glitches. They were dropped from our brave new world in 2009 but now OS says the demand is there for them to be modernised and reprinted. And, if your sat nav goes down, you’ll be very glad of the folded up map in the glovebox.