As my friends will attest, an obsession with maps is no joke. Working at a magazine based in Covent Garden in my twenties, I spent most lunch hours - time when I should have been schmoozing my way into high-powered journalism - browsing the Ordnance Surveys in Stanfords, London's finest map shop. What journeys of the imagination I made with my feet rooted to that carpet and my nose embedded in the 1:50,000s. I knew every contour line of the Rockies, every oxbow bend on the Danube, before I saw either in reality.

And this fetish lingers, even though I'm now almost grown up. I am an awful passenger-seat navigator - not because I can't read maps, but because I read them too diligently. I see not the most direct route from A to B, but the myriad enticing byways that make it desirable, indeed compulsory, to travel via C, D and E as well.

I've even started to acquire old maps. Landscape paintings and sepia-tinted photographs are all very well. But if you really want to know what, say, Milton Keynes looked like before it was Milton Keynes, consult a 19th-century OS map. Only this will show you the farms, fields and hedges - mostly laid out when Alfred was burning his cakes - that once stood where the great Castle Tesco now plonks its sheeny walls.

What's the attraction of maps? I think it's a paradox. They are humanity's attempt to capture the world on paper. But as a cartographer you can capture only a micro-fraction of what exists. For a start, three dimensions must be elided into two, and the globe must be shown (in a 500-year backwards-flip into medieval thinking) as a flat Earth. So you fudge. You are selective. You alter shapes and make crooked lines straight (as in Harry Beck's classic depiction of the spaghetti-tangled London Underground as an electrical wiring-circuit). You exaggerate features you consider important, and erase others.

And that gives you more dangerous ideas. Since your job involves sleight-of-hand anyway, why not make maps that deliberately promote a distorted world-view? One, perhaps, that shows things as you might wish them, rather than as they are. Those satirical “Texan Maps of the World” - showing the Lone Star State as a massive blob, the rest of the US as a peripheral apron, and Europe and Asia as doodles round the margins - are classic expressions of that. So is the infamous Vinland Map - thought to date from medieval times and prove that the Vikings charted Newfoundland, until someone pointed out that it used 20th-century ink.

But there are more sinister examples. Atlases intended for Arab markets don't label Israel. Similarly, maps in the old German Democratic Republic showed West Berlin as a blank space, as if its political non-status (in East German eyes) had morphed into physical non-existence too. Don't be smug. British OS maps adopt the same “blank space” approach to military bases.

These thoughts are triggered anew by Simon Foxell's compelling new tome, Mapping England (Black Dog Publishing). It's not the world's best-edited book - there are factual slips and literals - but it presents a splendidly provocative thesis. Maps, Foxell maintains, are “battlefields of ideas and ideologies, the locus of political, social and cultural skulduggery”. And England, as a non-nation within an uneasy United Kingdom for the past 300-odd years, is particularly prone to loaded image-making by mapmakers with a political or cultural axe to grind.

You can buy that argument or not. But the dozens of fabulous and fantastical maps that

the book includes - from the Gough Map of 1360 (England's first road map) to the surreal fantasy-maps of the artist Layla Curtis, conjuring an England crammed with Japanese place names - certainly make one think about “national identity”. Another artist, Grayson Perry, maps not England but “an Englishman”. He creates a Tudor-style cartographic display of what's in his psyche, with place names such as Delayed Gratification, Innit and Sissy Wet-Pants.

But we don't really need artists to jolt us with incongruous maps. The most startling example in Foxell's book is the map of England painstakingly prepared by the KGB during the Cold War, presumably in readiness for possible invasion, and only recently released from that allegedly defunct organisation's files. Not only does it chillingly render every English city in Cyrillic text; it also pinpoints the British military installations that Ordnance Survey discreetly omits!

Military necessity created Ordnance Survey (just as, two centuries later, it would create the GPS system). It wasn't chance that the first OS map, in 1801, was of Kent, the county most vulnerable to invasion. Since then maps have been made for all sorts of purposes. Foxell includes noise-pollution and urban-intrusion maps, a 2008 map showing the impact of the credit crunch, and even a Motherhood Map - showing not the incidence of pregnancy, but something much darker: mortalities among women giving birth. It revealed that those in the industrial North were twice as likely to die as southern mothers. The shock is that the map dates not from the Industrial Revolution, but 1930.

My map-making hero has to be the canal engineer William Smith. Digging all those ditches, this stubborn Yorkshireman became obsessed with rocks. In 1815, after decades of single-handed struggle, he made the first geological map of England. Not only did this herculean effort bankrupt him (he was flung in debtors' prison), it also incensed the religious and scientific establishments, because what he revealed about the rock strata beneath our feet was nothing less than an evolutionary view of the world's formation, anticipating Darwin's theories by 40 years.

Happily, he lived to enjoy his own vindication. He had shown something beyond how our landscape came into existence. He had proved that a map could not only reveal the world, but also change the world. Or at least the thinking world. I daresay that in the creationist strongholds of the US Bible Belt there are still classrooms in which geological maps are banned.

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