Maggie & Peter Slingsby

In the world of cartography, Peter and Maggie Slingsby are in a league of their own. From blue cranes marked down in the Overberg to phantom towns in the Karoo, nobody knows the South African landscape quite like they do. This year, they’re celebrating the 50th anniversary of their Garden Route map.

How did you two meet? Maggie: I arrived in Cape Town in 1972 after overlanding to South Africa from London with a group of friends. At the time, there weren’t many good maps of Cape Town and I was terribly confused by the geography of the city. To my mind, Table Mountain was facing the wrong way! As a foreigner, your natural inclination is to assume it faces south. I struggled on until one of my friends told me about a guy she knew who drew maps…

What made you start creating maps? Peter: I got impatient with what I call the “first-generation maps” of South Africa because they didn’t have much information on them. Initially, each of my maps was drawn by hand, like the first Garden Route map, which took almost four years to complete. At the time, there were maps being produced where you could tell that those involved had done no personal research at all. They made mistakes and kept repeating those mistakes in subsequent editions.

Maggie: Because usually people just copy maps, you see.

Peter: I did the legwork in my kombi (which was fancy because it had an eight-track player) with the assistance of my cat, Mango.

What mistakes did they make? Peter: If you go to the Koue Bokkeveld from Ceres, you might find yourself travelling up the Gydo Pass – it’s stunning. At the top you’ll come to a village called Op die Berg, which you can see for miles because it’s got one of those thousand-foot-high church spires… Maggie: For years and years, all the maps you could get in this country didn’t show the town of Op die Berg at all. They had, a bit further along the wrong road, a place marked “Bokfontein” on the map.

Peter: We couldn’t understand why they didn’t have Op die Berg, which had been there for more than 50 years, and then we discovered the reason: It was because Bokfontein was the name of the original post office, before Op die Berg was founded as a town. Bokfontein was never a town, it was only a farm, and the location wasn’t right either.

I posted about it on blogs and a map manufacturer must have seen it. Anyway, the name was changed on the map, but now it’s the right name at the wrong location!

How do you avoid making those mistakes? Maggie: When we’re working on a map, we drive every road and walk every path. We quickly discovered that if you don’t drive a road, you’ll miss something important. Little details, like putting smiley faces on interesting roads, or marking “leopard claw marks on tree”, is what sets us apart.

On our map of the Overberg, you’ll see a bunch of blue cranes scattered across the map wherever we saw them. We were at some or other function and a bunch of ornithologists told us that our map wasn’t accurate because blue cranes hadn’t been recorded in some of the areas we’d marked. I said, well we marked them where we saw them. A scientific survey was done and sure enough, there they were!

How were maps drawn before the digital age? Peter: By hand on a series of plates that you’d stack one over another. There was no digital storage, so you relied on the printers to keep your plates safe for you. One time, my printer moved premises and a series of my plates got lost – four years of work down the drain!

Is it easier now? Peter: Once computers came along, it did become easier because you could get a GPS and record detailed information. The advent of tools like Google Earth meant you could check things – it was like having a complete set of aerial photos at hand all the time. Again, to differentiate our products, we started collecting more information than we used to, including everything on the side of the road that could be used as a landmark.

What keeps you relevant in a world of Google? Maggie: Google Maps is great for telling you where to go, but it can’t put things into context like a paper map can. On one of our maps, you can see where a road leads, or what’s over the next hill. If you’re exploring an area, you can easily decide on a beautiful drive, or a good place to pull over. Google Maps doesn’t do that – you’re closed into a capsule that deposits you from one area to the next.

Peter: One of the great things about maps, which is different to books in South Africa, is that while books have a limited print order, there are always new people needing maps. For example, in the space of three years, a map of Table Mountain will have various inaccuracies and need to be updated.

How do you choose which areas you’d like to document? Peter: These days, we try make a conscious decision to do areas that are the least likely to change! Seriously, though, there are plenty of areas that we’d love to map out, but we have to go with what’s commercially viable. We’d love to do sections of the Eastern Cape coast, but “Sunshine Coast” doesn’t sell as well as “Garden Route”, for example, which is more iconic.

Maggie: Then there’s the Great Karoo, which we’d love to do, but there simply isn’t a piece of paper big enough…

Peter: Or enough life in us! I think we’d like to do our own map of the Drakensberg next. The ones we’ve done have been under commission, which comes with its own set of regulations and pressures. Creating our own map would give us licence to explore at our own time.

Maggie: Peter and I decided that we needed 10 titles to live off. When he was busy with his ninth map, I resigned from my teaching job and now we run the business together. Our mantra is, “We run the business, the business doesn’t run us.”

Peter: Which is why we’re going to Betty’s Bay this week!