Ordnance Survey (OS) was a 50-year-old company when a fire swept through its first headquarters at the Tower of London in 1841 -- the crown jewels saved ahead of stored paper maps.
The national mapping agency was forced to move to former barracks in Southampton and has resided in the city ever since. Decades on, the designers of The Hundred's cricket franchise Southern Brave must have known the regional symmetry when OS's CEO Nick Bolton spotted contours on the players' shirts.
"We are a particularly geographical nation," says Bolton, at the helm of one of Britain's oldest tech companies. "We are respected over the world for having this digital map of Britain, where other countries don't have anything near the degree of understanding we hold as a country within the Ordnance Survey."
Founded in 1791, the heritage organisation is still mapping for walkers, scouts and adventurers, but today OS's largest department is tech.
Only 3% of the company's revenues comes via paper maps, while the rest provides digital data sets that empower many walks of modern British life, says Bolton. OS's scale is vast; 600 million location features are updated 30,000 times daily, from coastlines and underground cables to its data requests underpinning everything from housing, roof types, environment and climate change.
OS also estimates that every UK adult touches its data 42 times a day. "From the moment they wake up and check train times on apps or look out the window and see a utility digging up the road, who rely on our maps above and below ground," adds Bolton.
"It's that which gets most OS staff out of bed in the morning. Because we know it touches so many lives. That's what makes it such a rewarding job."
Graduating with an engineering degree in 1992 a week before Black Wednesday, Bolton found jobs hard to come by. Driving a Fiat Punto around London, he began working in tech support for Apple Centre and proudly states he can replace motherboards on PowerBooks.
Gaining core customer skills, he applied for a job outside London having learned C Programming on the bus to work, and took a pay cut to work as a chairman's assistant at a software company before moving into product management and sales.
He left Softwright in 1995 to become an early employee at tech group Oxford Metrics, which needed a gamer to bring the firm into the entertainment space.
After an initial four-year spell, he returned in 2005 as CEO. The company notably built the motion-sensor technology behind ABBA Voyage, given free rein from its largest shareholder to pursue projects "which gave us a leading edge coupled with the latitude to try stuff out."
"That is what we are trying to do at OS, to give people the freedom to express themselves," says Bolton.
"Other mapping agencies are rolled together with other departments with forestry, geology or land registry. Our task is to own the map and improve the lives we all experience in Britain. That's a pretty unique place to be."
Bolton, who took over two years ago after 18 years with Oxford Metrics, is the company's first CEO with a tech background. He says that if the agency "had its time again" a CEO with tech experience should have been installed a decade before his arrival.
At the start of the year, OS cut nearly 100 jobs as the mapping service sought to simplify and align itself across the business, as well as with government in delivering the likes of infrastructure and net zero ambitions.
With six CEOs in the last eight years, he has now mapped record growth alongside stability as OS reported revenues of £194.6m.
The OS was originally set up to map Scotland, following the Jacobite uprising and hunt remaining dissenters in the previously uncharted Highlands, and later to map the south of the UK to protect against a feared French invasion.
Over 230 years later, OS's initiatives today include helping plan a twin city for Dubai and identifying which of the 6.4 million households in the north of England have driveways and the potential for access to electric vehicle (EV) charging infrastructure.
"One thing we talk about in the business is that it should be easy to answer a 'where' question as it is to ask them. We can all say 'where shall we go for our lunch next Sunday?' while in our business lives we have 'where shall we put those EV charging points?' That's the bit we have to unlock."
OS sends its flying unit across the UK every year which captures a third of the country due to British weather, as well as bespoke targets such as new sports venues and housing estates.
Meanwhile, when the Isle of Wight experienced a landslide in 2023, within 48 hours an OS surveyor was on hand with a drone to record updates. "You don't need to survey the whole time, you just need to know what's changed in detection," says Bolton.
A typical week for Bolton, a keen runner and hockey coach, will see him on the road two days and travelling three days from Berkshire to the Southampton office, which also holds archives he calls a "national institution". He oversees 1350 employees, including 220 surveyors across the UK.
OS, adds Bolton, also has a large portion of employees who have been with the business 40 years. Over the last six months, Bolton says on some weeks he was handing out two plaques a week to staff.
"It means the organisation has been getting it right, but also means that something speaks to them about that task that means they want to do it." says Bolton. "That's to be celebrated and doesn't happen in most tech businesses."
Bolton now sees insights from OS data as a key driver for the organisation's future. "How can we liberate greater efficiency for the whole country in order to make it easier to generate those insights?" he adds.
Tech will also be at the heart of that exploration. "At first glance maps are so instantly understandable, or you go into a pub and see an explorer map and it becomes intriguing," says Bolton. "It is instantly consumable but incredibly complex to build."
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