On Maps

Artist and pictorial map maker Kerry Lee created two distinctive maps of London, both of which were revised and adapted over a 20 year period, between the late 1930s and mid 1950s. (Read our two posts about Kerry’s life and...

This little clutch of maps and guides was acquired in 1936 by a British tourist in Stalin’s USSR. Some of them bear the original owner’s dated inscription, ‘W. Hackett, 22.12.36’. I’ve encountered some of these publications individually before, and discussed...

Back in April I wrote about a Gay-Z map of London, published by the Man to Man bookshop in Notting Hill c. 1977. It remains the earliest example of a separately published LGBT map of London I’ve seen, and I’m...

At the entrance of any modern Tube station are racks of passenger maps, free for anyone who needs one. The familiar format is very practical. Each map folds out to reveal three panels. It fits easily into the pocket and...

This post is a follow-up to Colouring Inside the Lines At last I had the opportunity to trawl through back issues of the Evening News for 1907, and it proved to be very fruitful. The Evening News and its readers...

Fred Stingemore’s contribution to the mapping of London’s Underground has been somewhat eclipsed by the reputations of the designers who came before and after, MacDonald Gill and Harry Beck. It was Gill who stripped away the surface topography completely, including...

One of the maps we’re looking forward to displaying at this year’s London Map Fair is an exceptionally rare survey of the city, made just after the Great Fire of London by John Oliver. Oliver’s entry in the Dictionary of...

It is easy to overlook that fact that by 1933, when the first edition of Harry Beck’s famous diagram was presented to the public, Beck was able to draw on a full sixty years of earlier attempts to map London’s...

Now and again I write in the hope that one of our readers is going to be able to offer further enlightenment. Today’s topic is gay city maps, made specifically for a gay audience. As far as I know, the...

For the first post of 2016 I’m delighted to return to the congenial company of artist and pictorial map-maker Kerry Lee (1902-1988). Two of Kerry’s children, John and Bronwen, and John’s wife Elizabeth have all been very generous with their...

This is an astonishing map, in some ways about forty years out of its proper time. Light-hearted metaphorical* maps of Europe, so popular in the period 1854-1915, had all but ceased when the joke wore thin, in the early part...