Old Pictorial Map of the Post Office Wireless Stations in 1939 by Macdonald Gill - British Isles, GPO, Radio

Macdonald Gill produced this pictorial map of the Post Office's wireless stations in 1939, working in the decorative, information-rich style that had already made him one of the best-known mapmakers of the interwar period, following earlier commissions including his celebrated Wonderground Map for London's Underground Electric Railways. Rather than a conventional topographic survey, this sheet is designed to explain the reach of the General Post Office's communications network across the British Isles, using illustration and lettering to make a technical subject accessible to a general audience at the end of the 1930s. It sits within a tradition of GPO-commissioned pictorial maps produced during this period, when public bodies increasingly turned to illustrators like Gill to present infrastructure and public services in an engaging, visually memorable way.

The map traces the GPO's long build-up of responsibility for Britain's communications, starting from 1870, when the government handed the Post Office control of the country's electric telegraph network and gradually bought out the private telegraph companies that had operated it before. It then follows the development of wireless telegraphy from 1904, the point at which the GPO gained control over the use of radio waves across the British Isles, a responsibility that expanded further as early radio and television broadcasting began to develop under the same government department during the 1920s and 1930s. By the time this map was published, Britain's wireless network already included well-known GPO sites such as the giant long-wave transmitting station at Rugby, the research station at Dollis Hill in London, and receiving stations at Ongar in Essex and Somerton in Somerset, the kind of scattered infrastructure this pictorial sheet sets out to illustrate across the length and breadth of the British Isles.

This is a fitting gift for anyone who spent a career with the Post Office, British Telecom, or the BBC, or for a collector of communications and transport history looking to add a genuinely unusual pictorial map to their collection. It is available unframed in a full range of sizes, suitable for a home office or a room dedicated to technology and engineering history. Whether marking a retirement from a career in telecommunications or simply chosen for the sheer charm of Gill's illustrated style, this 1939 map offers a rare pictorial record of Britain's early radio and telegraph network at the moment it stood at the edge of the television age.