After graduation, Taylor taught science at
Burton Upon Trent School for Girls for two years, and in 1905 moved to the Convent School in Oxford, where she undertook further study at the
University of Oxford. Herbertson had been one of her tutors in the Diploma course. The historian
Glyndwr Williams noted that this document "now forms the starting point of any discussion" of the motives behind Drake's expedition. Taylor submitted her research findings, including several published papers, under the title
Studies in Tudor Geography and was awarded a DSc in geography from the
University of London in 1930. Her examiners were
Edward Heawood and
Alexander Stevens.
Head of department Taylor was appointed chair of geography at Birkbeck College in 1930, succeeding her colleague John Frederick Unstead. She was the first woman to hold this position, though
Helen Gwynne-Vaughan was the first woman professor to be appointed at the university. As professor and department head, Taylor was a member of the University Board of Studies in Geography, which regulated teaching of the subject, and a member of the University Higher Degrees Sub-Committee which reviewed research topics and titles and appointed examiners for Masters and Doctoral dissertations. She continued her historical researches, publishing
Late Tudor and Early Stuart Geography 1583–1650 (1934), a sequel to her previous book, and scholarly articles and book reviews on topics such as navigation methods, ideas of the size and shape of the globe, and on individual explorers and cartographers, mostly of the 16th- and 17th-centuries. She sometimes pointed out the lack of historical understanding of her geographical colleagues, for example of the shape of the earth. Her 1931 paper
Imago Mundi begins: She goes on to give examples of texts from the 13th to 15th-centuries showing that the sphericity (or rotundity) of the earth was accepted by both scholarly and clerical opinion, and that disagreements were about the size of the earth, the disposition of land and water, and the possibility of the southern hemisphere being inhabited. The idea of "a picture of the geography of the times" also found expression in a 1936 book edited by
H.C. Darby,
An Historical Geography of England before A.D. 1800. Darby, a young geographer from Cambridge, had met Taylor at a meeting to discuss historical geography held at the
London School of Economics in January 1932. He was impressed with her approach and asked her to contribute. The book was planned as a series of cross-sections for particular periods, and Taylor contributed two chapters, one on
John Leland (1503-1552), and one on
William Camden (1551-1623). This enabled her to provide two pictures of England, one from the reign of Henry VIII, the other of Elizabeth I. Taylor's work on planning became important from the late 1930s. She was a supporter of the idea of a National Atlas of Britain, chairing meetings and publishing several papers on the subject. The plan envisaged maps showing physical geography, bio-geography, industry and commerce, and human geography. Taylor noted the lack of maps as a way of summarising public data: She stressed the value of a standard format to allow the results of work in different fields to be compared. and suggested that geographers had an important role to play in developing the project. During 1940 she was appointed to the national Panel on Reconstruction, chaired by
Lord Reith. Together with Leonard Dudley Stamp she prepared maps for planning, showing physical features, land use, movement of population, industry and communications. She also contributed to the work of the Association for Planning and Regional Reconstruction during and after
World War II and to the Schuster committee on planning. She continued to do research in her retirement, publishing numerous original papers on navigation and cartography, as well as book reviews. She also published articles in magazines aimed at a more general readership, such as
The Geographical Magazine and
The Listener on topics including population growth and planning. In 1954, ten years after her retirement,
The mathematical practitioners of Tudor and Stuart England appeared and in 1966 its sequel
The mathematical practitioners of Hanoverian England. Both books used the format of a narrative section followed by biographies of the practitioners and a bibliography.
Alfred Rupert Hall described it as a "fascinating cross-section through that aspect of the scientific revolution in England which was most clearly practical and of general concern to contemporaries". Francis Johnson regarded it as a valuable pioneering work, but drew attention to the lack of citations to the sources of her information, which he regarded as the major weakness of the work. Henry Calvet, reviewing the later book praised her narrative style, and her achievement in making so much information available in such a limited space. He also commented on the difficulty of finding sources for her statements, and on a number of errors that he attributed to her failing health. But he regarded it as an important book in spite of its imperfections. A book designed for a more general readership was
The Haven-Finding Art (1956). The scope of this book is indicated by its subtitle
A History of Navigation from Odysseus to Captain Cook. In the book, she dismisses the myth that ancient sailors navigated by "hugging the shore". While there certainly was coastal sailing (then as now) she provides evidence of deep-water sailing from early times, and also points out, though not herself a sailor, that close to the shore was not necessarily a safe place to be. After an introduction, Taylor presents four sections organised according to the methods available to the navigator: without magnetic compass or chart; with compass and chart; instruments and tables; and mathematical navigation. She describes methods that have been in use from ancient to modern times, such as observations of sun and stars, and the
sounding line, as well as those that have been superseded, such as releasing shore-sighting birds, and noting whether winds are warm or cold, dry or moist. She ends with the
Nautical Almanac, Hadley's
octant, and Harrison's
chronometer, which between them brought the pre-scientific age of navigation to a close. She investigated the geography of a period as the participants saw it, and the participants were not just the scholars, but the practitioners - the sailors and navigators, surveyors, explorers, and those who laid the mathematical foundations for technical development, made the instruments, and taught others how to use them. In her earlier work she dealt with men like
William Bourne,
Abel Foullon and
Jean Rotz. The later
Mathematical Parctioners books identified and described thousands of individuals who contributed to mathematical developments relevant to geography. Taylor's work was built upon by later workers such as Peter and Ruth Wallis and Gloria Clifton.
Honours and awards Taylor was a recipient of the Victoria Medal of the
Royal Geographical Society in 1947 and was made honorary fellow in 1965. She was one of the first Fellows of
Birkbeck College, and an Honorary Member of the
British Society for the History of Science (BSHS) and of the
Royal Institute of Navigation. She was the President of the geography section of the
British Association for the Advancement of Science twice. It was created to celebrate her 80th birthday and continued after her death. == Selected bibliography ==