Can you place your home town on a map of Great Britain?

I know the names and locations of most cities, upland areas, rivers and forests, and those I don’t know I am always keen to learn about.

That’s more than can be said for many of the students appearing on University Challenge. I am frequently aghast at the lack of geographical knowledge exhibited by people who are seen as the intellectual elite of this country.

A recent episode saw team members from Merton College, Oxford, wrongly identify Blackburn as Chester, place Kings Lynn on the coast of Kent, and then made a further blunder, by wrongly identifying the inland town of Bury St Edmunds as King’s Lynn.

A further set of questions about towns in South Yorkshire garnered just one correct answer from University College London. Students, and people generally, seem to take more interest in foreign parts than they do our own country. I was amused by how quickly one Oxford scholar answered a question on the Yalu River, speedily rattling off the correct answer “North Korea and China.”

Chester is not a Lancashire Pennine town. Picture: Pixabay (Image: Pixabay)

It’s not only on University Challenge. Contestants on Mastermind often exhibit the same ignorance when faced with questions about the geography of the UK, as do those taking part in other quiz shows.

At work too, I have encountered many a London-based PR company whose staff would ask: “Bradford? Is that near Newcastle?”

It makes me wonder whether schools still teach kids about the geography of the UK.

When I was at secondary school our geography teacher Mr Thackeray would periodically give out maps of Great Britain. On it were 20 numbered dots. We pupils would be asked to write the names of places and geographical features beside those dots. I loved this task and hated getting any wrong. I once got all 20 correct and was thrilled. I remember Mr Thackeray being amazed that I named The Solent and Spithead between Hampshire and the Isle of Wight – this was thanks to a jigsaw I had at the time, with coastal waters named.

It helped that we learned about the regional identity of counties – the Nottinghamshire, Yorkshire and Welsh coalfields, shipbuilding on the Tyne, Wear, Tees and Clyde, the fishing industry around the Humber, the Staffordshire potteries, Kent’s fruit-growing ‘Garden of England’. I could go on.

Do they even teach stuff like that nowadays? Give or take the odd industrial estate and car manufacturing plant, there’s scant industry left in the UK to learn about.

My geographical knowledge was also helped by our annual holidays. Every year Dad would book a holiday in a different corner of the UK. We would head to Pembrokeshire one year, the New Forest the next, then Suffolk, Dorset and Aberdeenshire. At the time I felt envious of pupils whose families jetted off to the Costa del Sol, but as I grew older I began to appreciate our UK breaks. I learned so much about my homeland – knowledge that I retain to this day.

I know I am lucky to have experienced such holidays, and many people are not so fortunate, but I also loved pouring over Dad’s schoolboy atlas, and his many Ordnance Survey maps. After we had been on a walk, I would study the route. I especially loved the Lake District – which we visited annually – and can pretty much remember each lake and its position on the map.

People travel more than ever now, to destinations at home and abroad. But could they identify those locations on a map? Or even place their home town? Sadly, even with an Oxbridge education, I very much doubt it.