The subject of projections is incredibly complicated and you did a good job of navigating the discussion (‘A map is never neutral’: meet the cartographers who took on centuries of western bias, 18 September).
However, suggesting that transverse Mercator is inherently biased is not fair (if it is possible to be unfair to an equation) to both the projection and the cartographers.
Mercator et al just did the job of creating maps that were useful for the European sailors they were working for. The fact that everyone carried on using it was our laziness and not their bias.
The Equal Earth projection is a much better representation for what we use maps for now, but that does not make the Mercator wrong.
You say “A London-centric worldview has long dominated how world maps are presented.” But I can think of almost no maps that have London at the centre. The international coordinate system (ie latitude-longitude, which is unchanged by this resolution) is based for arbitrary historical reasons on a meridian drawn through Greenwich.
However, the “centre” of this coordinate system is not London but a point in the sea off west Africa. No map or representation has to use this as the centre and the current best practice – called UTM – has 60 different zones (thus 60 centres) to represent all parts of the globe.
Even the UK Ordnance Survey mapping system is not “centred” on London. As far as you can say it has a centre, it would be somewhere in Lancashire.
Paul Harwood
London
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