Mapping Home: a child’s view on the pandemic 

Friday 15th October, 2021

By Steve Brace

Watching children and young people create they own maps is a fascinating process.  Often unencumbered by cartographic conventions, but with a strong sense of what they want to portray, their maps reveal new insights through: 

• the features and details they include or omit

• how they use a sense of scale to give relative importance to places, features or ideas

• how they connect different places through their depictions of journeys and other connections

• imaginative use of annotations and labels

• and how their ideas and views about places inform their illustrations

Their maps provide more than a guide to help a viewer orientate around a particular place or location.  They also illustrate how young people share their individual geographical consideration of the world, bringing their own meaning to fill in the blank ‘space’ of an undrawn map, through how they conceptualize and identify features and experiences.  

All these perspectives are to the fore in the Mapping Strand of the Stay Home Stories project.  This project has been asking children and young people, via their schools, to create maps with accompanying narratives about their experiences during Covid 19 and how they understood how ideas of home might have changed during the lockdowns.  A selection of these maps can be viewed on  www.rgs.org/mappinghome.

Their maps and representation of their homes took many forms. From ‘floor plans’ that might easily accompany an estate agent’s details, to the archetype of the ‘classic’ four windowed, pitched roof house with smoke billowing out of its chimney. 

In addition, some drew deconstructed homes or abstract maps, alongside those who referenced more conventional mapping styles.  

One map titled Inside my Flat welcomed the viewer to the sixth floor.

Another highlighted how the kitchen table had become the new ‘work-room’ during school closures.  Family relationships were often expressed through the connection of specific rooms to family members - ‘mum and dad’s bedroom’, and descriptions of what took place in identified spaces ‘the kitchen where my mum makes brilliant food’.  

Of central consideration were ideas of how the Covid lockdowns had changed the nature of the home, its organisation, use and connection with other (especially local) places. Kitchen tables or living rooms have been re-designated as the ‘home-school’ space.  Other features with deep connections with the lockdown experience were also explored, be it ‘my comfy bed, which is difficult to get out of’; the ‘Holy Xbox – the only salvation during lockdown’; or the idea of the four walls of a home being presented as a lockdown prison.   

Many maps also place a child’s home in proximity to other significant places during Covid, be it the local school, green spaces, and medical facilities.  Theses out-of-home connections were also referenced through digital links, with one map highlighting how phones and the internet were used to keep up-to-date with friend when they could not meet up.   

There has been much discussion of the impact of the Pandemic on the Covid Generation and the maps shared through Mapping Home provide an intimate exploration of children’s’ experiences of this unprecedented event. 

Mapping Home is led by the University of Liverpool in partnership with the Royal Geographical Society (IBG) and National Museums Liverpool.  

Find out how to take part in the mapping initiative here: https://www.rgs.org/about/the-society/what-we-do/teachers/stay-home-rethinking-the-domestic-during-the-co/

Educational resources are available for schools to undertake their own Mapping Home work via www.rgs.org/stayhome