
Kerry Lee, his dog Jim, and Dick Turpin on Hampstead Heath

Lee spent some of his early years in Switzerland with his brother Don. He then attended Reading Schools of Arts and Science, the Slade, and the Sorbonne in Paris. For a time he assisted his step-father, Mr Harvey (an architect and builder), as a draughtsman for several large buildings in London, including one of the earliest to boast a roof garden. The 1929 Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression pulled the rug from under the business. Mr Harvey seems to have lost his fortune and emigrated.
Lee looked for an alternative source of income, and produced his first map of London. He established Blandford Studios off Baker Street with a small group of fellow independent commercial artists, known as ‘Associated Artists’.His first pictorial map of London may have been produced for the Coronation of George VI in 1936. His well-known map of London produced for the Southern Railway in 1938 shows the royal coach at the foot of the map, attending the State Opening of Parliament.
Lee was attached to the Air Ministry during World War II. He was based in Hertfordshire making detailed cut-away drawings of German aircraft, apparently recovered from crash sites, to advise RAF pilots of new developments, for example in armour plating or firepower.After the War Lee returned to Blandford Studios. His celebratory map London: the Bastion of Liberty was published for the Travel Association of Great Britain c. 1946-47. He designed numerous maps as posters for British Rail: Cheltenham Spa (1951), Bedford (1953), Carlisle (1953), Nottingham (1953), Londonderry (1953), London (c. 1954), Dublin (1954), Edinburgh (1955), Norwich (1955), Cambridge (1957), Lincoln (1962), ‘Come to Wales’ (c. 1965). John notes that his father made two maps of Cambridge: a large one for British Rail, and a smaller one for ‘Pictorial Maps’, to match similar sized maps of Oxford and Stratford-upon-Avon.
Other pictorial maps include Birmingham, Jersey, Huddersfield, Chester, Derby, Leeds and Liverpool. Some, such as Oxford, are truly pictorial maps:
Others (eg Norwich and Lincoln) are architectural composites:
John knows of designs for maps of Paris, Rome, and sketches of Venice and New York, but it is not clear if they were ever published. Similarly, a ‘Literary Map of Britain’ seems to have remained unpublished:
He produced at least three murals of London, for the City Bank of New York in Berkley Street, for the Yorkshire Building Society in the Strand (still in situ), and this one for the Cunard office in Lower Regent Street:
He illustrated (or, to use his term, ‘decorated’) a number of books early in his career: a text book on arithmetic (Trevelyan & Morley: Four Walls, 1938, in the ‘functional arithmetic through citizenship’ series); a book on teaching English (Palmer: Book III More Advanced Oral Exercises and Written Compositions, 1939); a revised edition of Frank Swinnerton’s Georgian Literary Scene, and J. Hampden Jackson’s Problems in Modern Europe - the Facts at a Glance (1941). He also seems to have provided a map for the June 1936 issue of Time and Tidemagazine: The Links & the Breaks in the chains encircling Nazi Germany & Sanctioned Italy.
One of Lee’s first maps was of Hampstead Garden Suburb, where the family lived during the war:
Read part 2 of our Kerry Lee special here
This blog was first published on a different platform. The original comments are reproduced below:
Dr Richard Furness:
What a superb article. Kerry Lee did some wonderful poster work and over the years I have had the pleasure of owning five of these. The Cambridge, rich is red’s and gold’s is a poster classic
I had very basic data on Kerry Lee’s life but this his filled in several gaps. The accompanying pictures add to the story and some of these I had not seen before.
Richard Furness
Tim Bryars:
Thank you, and do watch this space. I hope to have some more on Kerry Lee very soon.
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