Upside Down World Wall Map - 33.25" x 23.5" Laminated

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Our pre-pasted wallpaper from HP needs no additional adhesive and is so simple to install that you won't need to pay for a commercial decorator to do it for you (although we have fitters available should you wish - call us on 01993 880 939 to discuss).

While the orientation of a map might seem harmless, it can have a significant effect on one's perception of the world, and the relative importance of different places. It isn’t too much of a stretch to think that people are less likely to care what happens in countries or regions that are ‘lower’ than them on the map or globe. Meier, Brian P.; Robinson, Michael D. (2004), "Why the sunny side is up associations between affect and vertical position", Psychological Science, 15 (4): 243–247, doi: 10.1111/j.0956-7976.2004.00659.x, PMID 15043641, S2CID 31201262 . The story of how it came to be considered to be that way is heady mix of history, astrophysics and psychology. And it leads to an important conclusion: it turns out that the way we have decided to map the world has very real consequences for how we feel about it. You'll always get distortions when mapping a sphere onto a two-dimensional space and so no map is strictly accurate. However, the popular Mercator world map distorts shapes and sizes as you move away from the equator.According to Dr Jayasuriya, Mercator's version is "extremely bad" for depicting the relative sizes of countries: "That's why Greenland, which is only about 1/14th the size of Africa, looks the same size as Africa," she says.

There is no good reason that the northern hemisphere is usually at the top and the southern hemisphere is at the bottom of maps. It’s just convention. So much of what your brain does is unconscious and automatic. It’s only when forced into an unusual circumstance that we become aware of those automatic associations. Exhibited in “Journeys of the Imagination,” at the Boston Public Library, Boston, MA, April - August 2006. MB (BRL)

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They are a fun way to pass some time on a train ride and a great way to try to see the world around you from an upside-down point of view! Sure enough, when shown a map of a hypothetical city and asked where they would like to live, people were significantly more likely to choose an area in the north of the city. And when another group of people were asked where fictitious people of different social status would live, they plotted them on the map with the richest in the north and poorest in the south.

On these unconscious foundations stand all our prejudices about the world and the people, plants, and animals that inhabit it. Why Is North At The Top Of Maps? Perspective games are a way to invert the internal mental maps that you’ve built up over your lifetime. The uncomfortable truth is that despite almost everybody imagining that the world is this way up, there is no good, scientific reason to think of north as being the roof of the world.Haviland, William A.; Prins, Harald. E. L.; McBride, Bunny.; Walrath, Dana. (2010), Cultural Anthropology: The Human Challenge, Wadsworth . Montoro, Pedro R.; Contreras, María José; Elosúa, María Rosa; Marmolejo-Ramos, Fernando (2015), "Cross-modal metaphorical mapping of spoken emotion words onto vertical space", Frontiers in Psychology, 6: 1205, doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01205, PMC 4531208, PMID 26322007 .

South America is not South of North America, but in fact diagonally south EAST of North America. If you draw a line straight south (up) from the atlantic coast of Florida, you would just barely catch the western edge of South America. If nothing else, it’s a sure-fire way to make the world seem fresh, and unexplored, once more. With so few earthbound discoveries left for our generation to make, all we can do is – to paraphrase Marcel Proust – look again at the world we’ve got, but this time, through different eyes. Another aspect of maps that we find very interesting in the south-up orientation is the SHAPE of countries. Some of them just look bizarre when viewed "upside down". Joaquin Torres Garcia, an Uraguayan painter who wanted to make a political point about South America, came up with the rarer south-on-top projection in the early 20th century.

Perhaps your first impression of this reversed map is that it's wrong...Or you may immediately wonder why you haven't viewed this before...Or you may wonder what the reasoning is for North typically being at the top. We never experience the world directly as it is. We only ever see the world from our own point of view. Given such a long history of human map-making, it is perhaps surprising that it is only within the last few hundred years that north has been consistently considered to be at the top. In fact, for much of human history, north almost never appeared at the top, according to Jerry Brotton, a map historian from Queen Mary University, London and author of A History of the World in Twelve Maps. “North was rarely put at the top for the simple fact that north is where darkness comes from,” he says. “West is also very unlikely to be put at the top because west is where the sun disappears. ” We advocate the Upside Down orientation because it unfamiliar and thus forces us to view the world differently!