Mary, Mary: Where Did Your Bookshop Go?
On the trail of Mary Camige and Mary Sims, poster artists and co-owners of the Portman Bookstore
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On Maps
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A Small Specimen of the Biggest Map: Fundraising for Horwood's Monumental Plan of London
No-one ever got rich from maps: a cautionary tale -
Stingemore Maps – Collect the Set
Everybody loves a good flow chart... -
Kerry Lee's London
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...
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A Tourist's Guide to Stalin's USSR
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...
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For Your Convenience – the first queer city guide?
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...
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The Edwardian origins of the tri-fold tube map: fit for the waistcoat pocket
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...
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Colouring Inside the Lines 2
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...
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Fred Stingemore: Man in the Middle
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...
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London Rebuilt: 350 Years since the Great Fire
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...
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Colouring Inside the Lines
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...
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From A-Z to Gay-Z
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...
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Kerry Lee Revisited: cartographer, commercial artist, socialist
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...
