John Davies (35) (1942–)

John Davies, editor of Sheetlines, the journal of the Charles Close Society for the Study of Ordnance Survey Maps, is an independent scholar. When he left school in Bradford in 1960, he says, it was “a prosperous city with plentiful opportunities”, where “going to university was not generally considered necessary”. Nearly 60 years later, and retired from a career in information systems, he believes that “a sense of adventure, curiosity and sufficient native wit has probably compensated for the lack of formal education”.

A lifelong map enthusiast, Davies first “encountered Soviet mapping while working in Latvia in the early 2000s”, and this “sparked…the urge to investigate the Soviet global cartographic project. We have dubbed these Soviet maps ‘the Wikipedia of the day’, in that the cartographers depicted on the maps everything they could discover about a place, without needing to know who would be using them.” Davies now runs the website Sovietmaps.com.