The Cartographer’s Mistake

Every map has a lie in it.

This is standard practice and not remotely a secret in the trade. You put in a street that does not exist — a copyright trap, a paper town — and if it turns up on a competitor's map you have your proof, because nobody accidentally invents the same fictional cul-de-sac.

Ordnance surveys have done it. Rand McNally famously did it. There is an entire discipline of people who hunt for them.

Vera Lindqvist put hers in the 1987 city edition and called it Almhagen.

She placed it in the north-east, in a district of small streets built in the fifties, where one more short residential road among two hundred would attract no attention at all. Fourteen millimetres of line and a name in six-point.

The 1987 edition sold about ninety thousand copies.

Nobody stole it. That is the first thing that happened, or rather did not happen, and after two editions Vera more or less forgot about Almhagen, in the way you forget a lie you told to a stranger.

In 1994 a letter came to the publisher, forwarded twice, addressed to "the cartographer."

It was from a man who wished to complain that Almhagen was not signposted from the main road, that he had been unable to find it, and that he considered this a failure of the municipality rather than of the map.

Vera wrote back explaining, as gently as she could, that Almhagen did not exist.

He wrote again. He did not believe her, on the grounds that it was on the map.

She let it go.

In 1998 there were three letters. In 2003, eleven.

The 2003 batch included one from a taxi firm asking for clarification on access, and one from a woman who had arranged to meet a friend there.

Vera went out to look.

The junction where Almhagen was not stood between a bakery and a wall. There was a gap of about four metres — a gap that appears in cities everywhere, a leftover, too small to build on and too big to ignore — and it was full of bins.

She stood there for a while feeling something she has never adequately described.

In 2006 the bins moved.

She has never established who moved them. The gap acquired, in stages over about two years: a bench, three planters, a wall-mounted postbox that was not connected to the postal system and that people used anyway to leave notes for each other, and a hand-painted sign.

The sign said ALMHAGEN.

By 2011 there was a book exchange and a Christmas tree. By 2015 the residents' association of the surrounding streets had a subcommittee, and the subcommittee had a dispute, and the dispute was about parking, and Vera read the minutes online and had to put her laptop down.

In 2019 the municipality added it to the street register.

They did it quietly, as an administrative correction, on the grounds that the address was already in use by a postbox, a bench and forty years of maps.

Almhagen is four metres wide and about eleven metres long and has never had a building on it and now, formally, exists.

Vera is eighty-one. She retired in 2009.

Last summer her granddaughter took her to see it, because she had not been since 2003 and had been putting it off for reasons she declined to examine.

There were people on the bench. The book exchange had a shelf of children's things. Somebody's cat was asleep in a planter, which felt like showing off.

There was a small plaque on the wall, added by the residents' association, giving the date of the street's founding.

It said 1987.

Vera looked at it for a long time.

"Is that right?" her granddaughter said.

"Near enough," said Vera.