Map Grid Paper

A grid you can refer to

Ten-millimetre squares, a heavier line every fifth one, numbers along the edges and a border round the whole thing.

The numbering is the point. Without it a grid is just a grid; with it, every square has a name, so you can write "the well is at F7" and be understood without pointing.

What people draw on it

Fantasy and campaign maps, where a grid reference is how a party describes where it is standing. Floor plans and room layouts, where 10 mm to the metre is a workable scale for a house. Garden beds and allotment plots. School geography work on grid references and coordinates, which is really the same skill under a different name.

Also model railway layouts, wargaming terrain, and the kind of sketch you make when you are trying to work out whether the sofa fits.

Reading a grid reference

Across first, then up. Ordnance Survey teaches it as "along the corridor, then up the stairs", and it is worth drilling because the two orders give two different squares and only one of them is where you left the treasure.

A four-figure reference names a whole square. Six figures divides each square mentally into tenths and names a point inside it, which is the step most children find genuinely hard and this sheet makes concrete — you can see the square you are subdividing.

Setting a scale

Decide before you draw, and write it in a corner.

One square to one metre suits room plans. One square to five metres covers a house and garden. For a fantasy map, one square to a mile or a league is conventional and nobody will argue. The number itself matters far less than having committed to one, because the commonest way a hand-drawn map goes wrong is that the scale quietly drifts halfway across the page.

Options

Line weight and colour are adjustable. Grey is the default here, which stays out of the way of pencil work and photocopies cleanly; blue is the classic drafting choice because some reproduction processes drop it out entirely.

The bold-every-five toggle can come off if you want a plain lattice, though for map work it usually earns its keep — counting to fifty in fives is quicker than counting to fifty.

Print at 100% on A4, US Letter or US Legal, or the squares stop being 10 mm and the scale you wrote in the corner stops being true.