Some elements of the police-station set vary slightly from the first Sweeney film to its sequel, but the vast map of Greater London is a permanent feature.

- Nara Island has been destroyed. Reconnaissance aircraft have sighted the creature in this area here.
- Excuse me sir, but that looks as though the thing is heading for England.
- Quite...

After she has destroyed Nara, a fictitious island off the Irish coast, Gorgo's mother is tracked in her quest to retrieve her captured baby. This first map room is dominated by maps of the British Isles.

When she reaches London, we shift to a different map room with a more localised map:

Here it is confessed by the officer in charge that their mapping of her movements is not particularly effective: 'Piccadilly Circus? There's no way of telling where this thing will turn next...'.

In effect such mapping is as difficult a task for the cine-tourist, since the monster is shown in successive parts of London (Trafalgar Square, London Wall, St Paul's, Piccadilly Circus, Battersea Park) with little respect for the topography of the city. This does of course communicate the general confusion of the terrified population as the city is indiscriminately destroyed:

There are maps in only two places in this film. The first place is a Battersea Labour Exchange, where every one of the five cubicles we see has the same map of a section of London (the S.W. districts around Battersea). The maps are presented individually as Leamas (the protagonist) passes, then in a serried rank.

This is a uniform, regimented environment, but the cubicle to which Leamas is summoned has its map placed out of line (and the lamp above it is a little dimmer),  hinting at the difference in the treatment he receives (he is sent to a job in a library as part of a convoluted plan hatched by the Secret Intelligence Service).

The other place with maps is a room in East Germany where an in camera tribunal is being held:

There are two maps in this room. One is of the DDR, and is very  distinctive. It is drawn to demarcate specific but (to me) unfamiliar sectors of interest, and looks as if it should be in an operations room (pinned to it are photographs of motor cars, and it  is inscribed 'Unternehmen 212', which I cannot gloss).  It is also remarkable because it shows nothing of what is around East Germany, as if it were an island:

The second map is of a set of buildings, the camp to which Leamas has been brought. It is inscribed Mühlberg/Elbe, the location of the German prisoner of war camp Stalag IVB which - significantly for the film's thematic of shifting loyalties ('availability') - became a notorious Soviet internment camp immediately after WW2.

The mapping of the film's London locations poses certain problems. A sequence in which Leamas is trying to ensure he is not followed shows him in different parts of London: Fleet Street, South Kensington Station, Gloucester Road, and then his destination, the residential street we see here (as yet unidentified):

Leamas is here away from his usual territory around Battersea. His address is Falcon Road S.W.11, he meets a secret service contact in Battersea Park, and when he goes to the Labour Exchange, the official suggests a job at Battersea General Hospital, then sends him to an address nearby (Candahar Road). 

He points to the location on the map, but his fingers are the wrong side of the river entirely:

No one should be looking so closely as to to be troubled by this solecism. More troubling, anyway, would be the fact that the Labour Exchange itself is topographically compromised.  It is supposed to be in Battersea; on the way there Leamas passes a tattered poster indicating as much:

However, this exterior is not in S.W.11 but across the river in W.2. Here, from the Reel Streets site, is the evidence:

The film as a whole was always going to be topographically compromised, since the scenes set in the DDR would have to be filmed elsewhere (Ireland, in the event). So having one part of London pass for another is hardly serious. 

John Rogers’ film presents the perambulating Nick Papadimitriou, ‘deep topographer’, as he surveys his domain (he is the unelected Chair of the non-existent Middlesex County Council, see here).

Maps, along with signage and landmarks, are clearly part of the film’s own deep topography, but Rogers doesn’t rely on them to show how Nick Papadimitriou does his chorographic work. He shows us instead Nick walking, Nick stopping to gesticulate, Nick turning to look in another direction, Nick pointing, Nick walking on again…. All are means of situating us in a territory defined more by its moments of retrieved memory than by the functional lines that cross it.

n.b.: Given his passion for the North Middlesex/South Hertfordshire Escarpment (see here and here), I’d say Nick Papadimitriou was less of a topographer than a chorographer, chorography being ‘the art of describing or mapping a particular region or district’.

(You can watch The London Perambulator in full here.)

The third in  the Harry Palmer series is still deriving material out of its difference from Bond. The map of London on the wall of Palmer's dingy office contrasts with the world maps on walls in early scenes of  Bond films. Now a private detective, Palmer's sphere of activity is local, not global. 

When Palmer does travel, he faces the un-Bondlike challenge of finding on  a map an address in a phone book.

Ou maps pull back from this exactly pinpointed address in Helsinki to a more general view of the Baltic region, and even when - in Ed Begley's centre of operations - we have the familiar world map that signifies megalomania, the Baltic region is marked by a concentration of lights. 

In a further contrast with the Bond corpus, Syd Cain's operations rooms in  Billion Dollar Brain are  deliberately modest affairs compared with, for instance, the spaces created by Ken Adam for that year's Bond film (even if that is clearly the same map on the wall, above and below - both scenes were shot at Pinewood) :

For its climax Billion Dollar Brain shows opposing forces plotting the final confrontation, each on their own maps:

These last two map scenes both show humans attempting to arrange the world my arranging things on maps. This is the complement of the film's nature motif (as in the Alexander Nevsky-like climax on the ice). Human endeavour  vs untamable nature is an opposition neatly foregrounded in this dissolve from the penultimate to the last sequence:

‘The evasion of reality is marked by Clive's two- dimensionalisation, as his substantial form is replaced on the screen by an ephemera, a walking shadow, an apposite nod to Macbeth, perhaps, for consequent upon the loss of his love, Clive's hunting life is a sound and a fury, a rampaging safari, signifying nothing. A similar montage immediately after the death of Clive's wife Barbara reinforces the point.  Its status as a denial of historical progress is made clear as this second speeded journey through the inter-war period culminates in 1938 with a map of Munich and strains of the German national anthem. Clive later hangs Barbara's portrait in the 'den' along with his other trophies, emphasising what is now clear. It replaces, rather than proves, virility, and undoes Clive's self-appointed status as masculine epic hero.’
 Andrew Moor, Powell & Pressburger: a Cinema of Magic Spaces (London: I.B Tauris, 2005), p.75

A 'Map of Lower Egypt and the Fayum' is the background to a scene from the  time of Clive's 'masculine epic heroism':

Maps of London are in the foreground of the events that will lead to his final emasculation:

‘Two primal scenes take place at the beginning of the decade, in films that do not yet swing but are already modern. Victim (1961) begins at a building site, the substantial development around Stag Place including Esso House (briefly to be glimpsed in the protest march sequence of Blow Up). The location is an explicit metaphor for the film’s idea of a new world to be built (one where sex between men is no longer illegal). The Young Ones (1961) also begins at a high-rise building site, though here modern architecture expresses not newness but the rapacity of the old (in the form of the hero’s property-developer father – ‘the old one’). In the narrative climax the young ones connect with London’s traditional aspect and architectural heritage by putting on their show at the splendid Empire Theatre, Finsbury Park (built 1910). By preserving on film this vestige of the past before its actual demolition by developers the next year, The Young Ones ends on a note of deep irony about an oncoming modernity.’ 
R-F Lack, 'London Circa Sixty Six: the Map of the Film', in Gail Cunningham and Stephen Barber (eds), London Eyes: Reflections in Text and Image (Oxford: Berghahn, 2008)

Both films also have map scenes in police stations.

An occasional series posting two maps from different films, for comparison without commentary.