When was the last time you consulted a paper map? Nearly 15 years ago, when I first moved to London, the famous A to Z was a crucial piece of urban kit: indispensable once you’d been disgorged by the tube into unfamiliar surroundings. Now, all you need is a phone, and the Royal Institute of Navigation (RIN) is concerned. Learning to read maps properly, it argues, is an important rite of passage, developing character and encouraging independence. “Generations are now growing up utterly dependent on signals and software to find their way around,” it warns.

Perhaps the RIN should stop worrying and learn to love the new technology. After all, it’s wonderful to have a responsive, accurate and highly portable map close at hand. How likely is it that millennials will find themselves far enough from civilisation (for which, read a battery charger) that they’ll be caught short and disappear like the girls in Picnic at Hanging Rock?

But we’ll be losing something far greater than orienteering skills if we dispense with hard-copy maps altogether. For centuries, parchment and paper have fostered huge creativity among cartographs and planners. Maps can be symbols, propaganda, or utopian visions. They can even be pure fantasy. Here are 12 of the most striking.

Mappa Mundi

Photograph: Public domain

One of the most famous medieval maps in existence, the Mappa Mundi, dates from around 1300 and is kept at Hereford Cathedral in England. It was drawn on calf skin, and depicts Jerusalem as being at the centre of the world. Great Britain and Ireland are squeezed into the bottom left hand corner.

Piri Reis’ map of the Mediterranean

Photograph: Public domain

This map of the Mediterranean, surprisingly accurate for its time, is a late 16th century copy of one drawn in 1521 by Piri Reis, an admiral in the Ottoman fleet. He also created the first Turkish maps showing North America and the New World.

Leo Belgicus

Photograph: Public domain

Throughout history, maps have been used to send political messages. In this one from the 16th century, the Low Countries are portrayed as a formidable lion (helped out by the geography of the Dutch coast). At a time when its people were engaged in a struggle for self-determination, it served as a potent symbol of patriotism and independence.

Eagle map of the United States

Photograph: Public domain

We all see faces in the clouds, and cartographers find familiar shapes in the outlines of continents. In this 1833 map, the eagle, national bird of the United States, perches on the Florida Keys, its beak protruding just north of Cape Cod. The illustration is from a book called Rudiments of National Knowledge, Presented to the Youth of the United States, and to Enquiring Foreigners.

Bird’s-eye view of New York

Photograph: Public domain

We’re not told whether it’s the gaze of an eagle or some other bird. But this avian view of New York City from 1909 achieves a kind of realism that 2D maps can’t. The by then almost entirely developed island of Manhattan tapers away into the distance, and the cliffs of New Jersey lead the eye towards a cloud-strewn horizon.

London before houses

Photograph: Public domain

Even the most advanced city sits on top of natural history stretching back millennia. This fascinating 1884 map shows what lies beneath London – an estuarine landscape of creeks and swamps, gently sloping towards the sea.

John Snow’s cholera map

Photograph: Public domain

Sometimes maps give you the perspective you need to solve an otherwise impossible problem. In 1854 Dr John Snow decided to chart an outbreak of cholera in Soho, central London, in order to determine what was causing it. He found cases (marked as black lines) clustered around a water pump in Broad Street, revealing it to be the source of the infection.

London Underground map

Photograph: Public domain

Maps don’t always look like the real thing. Although more geographically accurate than today’s tube map, this 1908 guide to the London Underground is still somewhat abstracted. Its lack of clutter and colour-coding brilliantly suited the needs of passengers, and it has been imitated across the world.

Design for Canberra

Photograph: Public domain

Maps of places that don’t yet exist can be used to fire the imagination. This plan for Australia’s from-scratch federal capital was submitted to a competition arranged by the government by Walter Burley Griffin in 1911. His design, influenced by the garden city movement and formed of a series of intersecting circles, was eventually chosen from among 137 entries.

Scott and Amundsen’s routes to the South Pole

Photograph: Public domain

Documenting one successful and one doomed expedition, this map stands as a monument to those who died, and closes a chapter in the exploration of Earth that began thousands of years previously. Crossing the last uncharted landmass was to prove fatal for Captain Robert Scott and his companions, but their names have been recorded for posterity as a result.

The Earthsea archipelago

Photograph: Liam Davis (Public domain)

Maps of the imagination serve no practical purpose, but they can take on wonderful associations. The world created by Ursula K Le Guin in her Earthsea novels is made more vivid by the maps the beginning of each book, as are the alternate realities of JRR Tolkien, CS Lewis and many other authors.

The Vinland map

Photograph: Public domain

We end with a reminder that even paper maps can be unreliable. Archaeologists know that Vikings reached North America centuries before Christopher Columbus. And in the top right hand corner of this 15th century chart, said to have been copied from a 13th century original, are the words: “By God’s will, after a long voyage from the island of Greenland to the south toward the most distant remaining parts of the western ocean sea, sailing southward amidst the ice, the companions Bjarni and Leif Eriksson discovered a new land, extremely fertile and even having vines … which island they named Vinland.” It might fit with our understanding of history, but many believe the Vinland map is simply a 20th-century fake.