Few, if any, cold war historians believe Soviet Russia was ever actively planning to invade Brighton, Hove and Shoreham, but a remarkable map suggests the country’s leaders had been prepared should the opportunity have arisen.

The British Library is putting the detailed Soviet military map of Brighton and its surrounding area in Sussex on display as part of an exhibition that opens to the public on Friday.

The library has more than 4m maps in its collection but the exhibition will feature 200 and will aim to tell, for the first time, the history of the 20th century through maps.

There is much that will stop visitors in their tracks, from the funny to the chilling, and the Brighton map could be a bit of both. “It is incredibly interesting because it is so detailed,” said the show’s lead curator, Tom Harper. “It shows individual houses … it is a wonderful thing. The existence of this map does not mean that the Soviet Union was going to invade Brighton. It is military intelligence – it is just in case.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Section of the 1990 Soviet map of Brighton, showing the Shoreham area. Photograph: 11861/British Library

The Brighton map was one of a number found in abandoned depots in Latvia in 1992, after the fall of communism. The maps show towns and cities in startling detail with buildings classified as military coloured green, industrial rendered black, administrative purple, and other premises brown. Harper said the maps were evidence of a global military mapping project that was similar to the American Corona satellite programme in the 1960s.

Each map in the exhibition tells its own story, not all factual. Included is the original map artwork for the islands of San Serriffe, which was published by the Guardian on 1 April 1977. The Guardian’s accompanying article claimed to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the island’s independence – but was in fact one of the most successful of all April Fool jokes. All the names for that map were linked to printing and typesetting. If people did not get San Serriffe, or its capital, Bodoni, then the fact the two main islands were called Upper Caisse and Lower Caisse should have been something of a clincher.

The exhibition also shows literature’s Middle-earth maps, drawn by JRR Tolkien and his son, Christopher, to help guide readers of Lord of the Rings through Rohan, Gondor and Mordor.

There is also EH Shepard’s pencil-drawn map of the Hundred Acre Wood, complete with Eeyore’s “gloomy place” and the Pooh “trap for heffalumps”, which was first published on the endpapers of AA Milne’s Winnie the Pooh in 1926 and is on loan from the V&A Museum.



Many of the maps illustrate some of the 20th century’s most significant events. For the first time, four 3D relief models, from 1917, of the western front in Europe are going on display – maps which first world war British generals, stationed a few miles behind the frontline, used to inform their decisions.

Also being exhibited for the first time are British Ministry of Defence maps which imagine cold war battles and which were used in military college exams. One shows a nuclear explosion in Edinburgh and traces how far the fallout would spread.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Nazi 1940 map plotting locations of European immigrants living in the US. Photograph: British Library

From the second world war there is a map produced by the Nazis showing the distribution, by state, of first and second generation immigrants to America. The information would have helped Joseph Goebbels’ propaganda ministry to direct adverts urging the US to stay out of the war.

Another key part of the show is mobility and transport. The exhibits include a “Reshaping of the British railways map” showing just how much of the rail network Richard Beeching planned, in the early 1960s, to dispense with, and Harry Beck’s early sketch for his groundbreaking London tube map.

Harper said the aim was to illustrate the variety of maps and the technology behind them, which in the 20th century, for the first time, were at people’s fingertips. “Maps became important, powerful, objective tools to help navigate the strange, brave new world,” he said.

• Maps and the 20th Century: Drawing the Line is at the British Library from 4 November to 1 March 2017