This weekend thousands of Britons will set off on journeys across these ancient islands following instructions that detail every roundabout and Broad on their way. Their satellite navigation systems, mobile phones or online mapping services will tell them exactly where to go.

The only thing missing will be any real sense of where they are.

Medieval churches, woodlands and stately homes will not be marked on their maps. Wetlands, Viking burial grounds, castles, cathedrals and all the quirks, nooks and crannies of the landscape will have vanished into the grey spaces between the roads.

Last night, at the headquarters of the Royal Geographical Society – beside the Albert Hall, on the intersection of Kensington Gore and Exhibition Road, a place known to London cabbies as “hot and cold corner” – the president of the Royal Cartographic Society led the lament at this loss of a sense of place.

In a speech to more than a thousand geographers, all of whom had managed to find their way to the building for the society’s annual conference, Mary Spence said that Britain’s heritage was being wiped from the map.

A formidable arsenal of navigational tools is now available to the travelling public. Ms Spence argued that instead of adding to the collective knowledge of the British landscape, however, these were serving to wipe such knowledge from the public consciousness.

“Corporate cartographers are demolishing thousands of years of history – not to mention Britain’s remarkable geography – at a stroke by not including them on maps that millions of us now use every day,” she said. “We are in real danger of losing what makes maps so unique; giving us a feel of a place even if we’ve never been there.”

Before she made this withering address on the vanishing of British addresses, Ms Spence told The Times that the rot had begun nearly a decade ago, with the arrival of satellite navigation systems. To deliver journey plans on to a small screen, the maps had to be stripped of all but their most basic elements. As the information was digitised, “people who weren’t cartographers – computer people – were used to put maps together,” she said. “If you are driving from A to B, you miss everything that is not directly on your route,” she added.

Ms Spence had used Google Maps to plan her journey to the lecture hall. “The National History Museum, the Science Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum – none of them was on the map,” she said. In fact Google Maps places the Royal Geographical Society a street away from its corner on Exhibition Road.

“I recently went to Worcester,” she said. “The street map was wonderful, but the cathedral was missing.” Motorists following Google Maps through Wiltshire may be told to “exit on to the A303 toward Andover”, but they may have no idea that they are passing Stonehenge.

According to the book-industry research group BML, sales of maps and atlases have fallen by 36 per cent since 2004, as travellers turn to sat-nav and internet maps. A spokesman for Ordnance Survey said yesterday: “These resources are good at telling you the fastest way to get somewhere. What they don’t give you is the context of where you are going.”

It was left to Ed Parsons, a geo-spatial technologist from Google, to defend his territory. “I think people who are geographically challenged have always been geographically challenged,” he said. “The big change is that the information is now much more accessible.”

Whereas Ordnance Survey maps were designed for the military, and churches were added simply as useful landmarks, digital maps could now be customised to reveal the location of fish-and-chip shops in any given district, he said. “If you want to know exactly where Doctor Who episodes were produced around the UK, that can be put on to a map,” he said.

But Peter Collier, a cartographer turned academic at the University of Portsmouth, felt that the British were gradually losing their sense of direction. Map reading was less well taught, cartography was in decline and air travel eroded a sense of the landscape between locations, he said. “Also, children don’t walk around and explore any more,” he said. “My daughter has no sense of direction, despite having a cartographer as a father.”

Explore UK News

• Crime News

• Education News

• Health News

• Scotland News

Times Recommends

• Fern Britton: 'I still can't see that I was wrong'
• Extreme cooking
• Easy French: Tarte Tatin