Canary Wharf’s annual public light show is back – it closes this Saturday, so you have just three more evenings to get down to the Isle of Dogs after dark and see 21 illuminated artworks. There’s a special map produced each year to show where on the campus the exhibits are. We reviewed last year’s map, and for this year’s show, it’s been updated with locations and preview pics – here’s the official map as a PDF. The site is relatively compact and you can likely visit all 21 in a short walk by starting at Westferry Circus and heading eastwards, then anticlockwise and Jubilee Park, ending in the north at the Crossrail Place shopping centre/rooftop garden/future station, which has various food options. Or, if arriving by DLR, start at Heron Quays, go anticlockwise around to Crossrail Place, and then head westwards out to Westferry Circus to complete the tour. Winter Lights is a nice idea, it’s not ridiculously crowded like the London Lumiere was last year, so you can see the works without having to look over people’s shoulders, and get between places quite quickly. And it’s really nice to see a bespoke, attractive map being produced, rather than a collection pins on a Google Map or poorly designed smartphone app which seems to be more common for events like this. From the Canary Wharf...

It’s been a wet and drab December so far – so why not escape the gloom and get into the spirit of the season with the biggest Christmas market/funfair in London? Winter Wonderland, which occupies a huge space at the eastern end of Hyde Park, stretching almost from Marble Arch to Hyde Park Corner. The organisers have kindly produced a map, which you can see here. It is very much in the style of a theme park map, lots of bright colours and 3D representations of the rides. It certainly gives you a flavour of what is going in at Winter Wonderland, and illustrates just how big it is. Incidentally, the map doesn’t have a north arrow on it, which is particularly naughty as it is not aligned to the north. Instead, eastwards (towards Park Lane) is up. Overall though, we like the map – lots of snowy Christmas trees on a map of London! Your initial experience of Winter Wonderland will very much depend on which gate you enter from. If you love a snow-themed circus-style set of rides, then the entrances near Marble Arch, to the north, will get you right into the action. However, if you prefer a slightly more refined experience, with wooden Christmas market chalets, a Bavarian Village food court, an outdoor ice rink and a more traditional/less high-octane funfair, then head to the area from the Hyde Park Corner or Knightsbridge tube stations, to the south. Of course, you can walk right through the site from one to the other, but it does get very crowded at evenings/weekends, and the site is huge. Winter Wonderland is free to get in to (rides/experiences cost, of course) and all traders this year accept contactless payments. It’s open at 10am-10pm every...

This lovely map, hand-created by artist-cartographer Adam Dant, which was commissioned by the East End Trades Guild, is launched today at their Christmas takeover of Old Spitalfields Market – you’ll be able to pick up a free copy there. The map shows the locations of some of the more interesting traders and small businesses in the Tower Hamlets area and other parts of the East End, such as along Columbia Road. The map is an update of a similar map produced by Dant for EETG last year. The new one has a mainly black-and-white background, allowing the trader markers and a number of cartouches and other map embellishments to stand out. This post is Day 1 of the Mapping London advent calendar, where we’ll feature 24 of our favourite Mapping London maps from the last few years, including some new ones! Check our Twitter, Facebook or Instagram accounts each day between now and December 24 to see each day’s pick. Thanks to Carefully Sorted and the Hackney Business Network for the images used in this...

If Lumiere London, which finished yesterday, has whet your appetite for seeing artistic displays of light after dark, then there is another festival of lights which runs until Saturday. It’s at Canary Wharf and called Winter Lights. Think Lumiere London, in a smaller area and without the huge crowds. And, like the King’s Cross, it’s produced its own special map for the event, which we feature above. Outdoor exhibits are indicated as magenta circles, and indoor ones are shown as white circles. It doesn’t quite have the glowing-lights-at-night feel of the Lumiere maps, but it’s clear and easy to read, and shows the area’s water-dominant geography well. Canary Wharf is a reasonably compact site, so you should be able to see many of the lights quickly – and Canary Wharf itself at night is quite impressive, even without the extra lighting. Winter Lights runs from 5-10pm, until 27...

King’s Cross is one of the six Lumiere London areas, where light-based artworks are on display every evening until Sunday. We looked at the general maps of the event yesterday, but we discovered also that King’s Cross has its own map, showing where the exhibits are. You don’t have to follow the marked route, although it does take you past all the key exhibits, and, with the expected large crowds, you may find it makes sense to follow this path of least resistance! Mapping London likes this attractive, clear map that is using a nice “nighttime” black, pastel pink and maroon colour scheme, bright colours for the routes and attractions, and nice labelling for the new streets. The area is rapidly evolving with different areas constantly opening up to the public. Current construction zones are shown as areas of dots. The canal is shown with watery waves, and green areas are a lighter pink shade. The overall effect is rather nice. Paper copies of this map are being handed out at the entrances to the area each evening. People who get one, and visit four places marked on the map (including a colourfully lit night market), can get their map stamped at each, and then and get free candyfloss or a glow band. Waterlicht (No. 5 on the map) is the undoubted highlight – lasers and dry ice across the huge Granary Square. See pic below for the general effect, it is one to definitely experience for yourself, it fills the whole square and has the crowds underneath it in awe. It reminds me of the Weather Project at the Tate Modern back in 2003. If you are looking for No. 7, look up high! It’s a screen suspended from a crane, which is...

The Lumiere London, a free show of more than 50 light-based artworks, scattered throughout central London, starts today and the lights are switched on for the next four evenings, until Sunday 21st. It’s the second running of the event, after the inaugural in January 2016 which led to huge crowds of onlookers on the streets (over a million in total). This year, many more central London roads are closed to traffic, which may make things easier for moving around on foot. This year’s event is based on six zones, and there is a simple map (above) showing the zones, and maps for each of these zones (two of these are below). There is also a more detailed map (excerpt at bottom) that you can buy for download, and a free app, which is also useful for navigating between the works. In fact, the website map, the pay-to-download map excerpt and the map in the app are all slightly different! Probably easiest just head to the giant ball above Oxford Circus and then follow the crowds. We like the stylized zone maps, they have an appropriately night-time/glowing theme, and should be quite useful to navigate with – or else just follow the lights and look up! London Lumiere is promoted by Visit London and organised by...

It’s December! So Christmas is not far away, and so here’s a nice map which takes that always popular London map – the tube map – focuses on the inner city section, coverts the lines to coloured tissue paper, and hangs baubles on many of the stations, detailing a nearby Christmas-related attraction, be it a Christmas market, and ice rink, panto or other seasonal event. There’s 100 altogether. It’s more useful for ideas than navigation, although it will at least get you to the nearest tube station. Watch out – a couple of stations are on the wrong side of the River Thames though! To its credit, the London Overground gets a look in (all the interesting new stuff in London is happening near the Orange Line isn’t it?) The poor tube map gets reused for all sorts of different kinds of things (including a similar 2016 Christmas map) but the colours and lines are such an important identity for how London works, that it’s a natural way to present geographic information like this. And while an official Christmas-edition tube map would be amazing, this is certainly the next best thing. Here’s the full version, with captions and station/distance information in the section below, click for a larger image (if your browser then resizes the full image back down, click it once more): The map was commissioned by Clarendon and created by...

Welcome to the Mapping London Christmas List 2016! Not long now until Christmas Day – if you are having a last minute present crisis, our list includes direct links, so you can browse, order, sit back and relax in the knowledge that the present selections for your London map geek friends (or yourself!) are all sorted.     Books     London: The Information Capital – The ground-breaking book on data, graphics and maps about London, by Mapping London co-editor Dr James Cheshire, has been recently published in a softback edition and is currently available for the bargain price of just £10.49. See our review or get it on Amazon.     Curiocity: In Pursuit of London – This huge, whimsical and alternatively focused compendium of London was published earlier this year. See our review or get it on Amazon.     Where the Animals Go: Tracking Wildlife with Technology in 50 Maps and Graphics – The second book by James is newly out. Find out, in a series of stories, maps and graphics how animals migrate and move through the world. Yes, there is a London map in it! Guess which creature it features? Get the book on Amazon.     The London County Council Bomb Damage Maps: 1939-1945 – We’re highlighting this one as it’s been a consistent best-seller with readers of Mapping London since it was released just over a year ago. A weighty tome reproducing the detailed, carefully coloured maps of districts of London, showing the damage wrought by the Blitz of London and other attacks during the Second World War. The maps were painstakingly drawn for the London County Council, shortly after the war’s end. See our review or get it on Amazon.     The Great British Colouring Map: A Colouring Journey Around Britain...

Here’s a rather nice map combining the famously colourful and diagrammatic tube map with Christmas tree lights, to create an infographic, “The London Christmas Map”, showing the Christmassy events happening in London. You can see a full version of the map, including a key and listings for each event and how far it is from the nearest tube station, here on the Marbles website (the map was commissioned by them). Ironically the map doesn’t include the locations of the best London Christmas lights – for those, visit Regent Street, Oxford Street and Carnaby Street. I’m sure Old Bond Street’s are also impressive! This is a really nice, clear artistic map which brings me into mind some of the decorative tube maps produced by Max Roberts, particularly his Art Nouveau one. I like particularly the ends of the lines, where the cables unravel to reveal the “plug” at the end of the line. There is also a good balance of lines and adornments, the latter giving the map a suitably Christmassy flavour. Spotted on Reddit. The author is...

London: A World of Eating is a little map from Herb Lester – prolific producers of quirky pocket London maps with bespoke cartography (we recently featured their Punk London map). The map, which showcases some of London’s many interesting eateries featuring food from other countries, is sold out on their own website, but copies are available from Place in Print for just £4. We like the simple green-toned map, with bright coloured buttons showing the food hotspots. As you might expect, Covent Garden and Soho form London’s biggest cluster, though King’s Cross, Brixton and Borough are three of the other areas with multiple must-visit locations – there’s over 100 in all. Like food maps? See the “Related posts” links for more great London food maps. Competition! To celebrate London’s fantastically varied cuisine, we have a competition! You can win three pairs of tickets to the BBC Good Food Show taking place at London’s Olympia exhibition hall, from 11-13 November. The tickets are good for visiting the show on Friday 11 or Sunday 13 (so not Saturday 12). We will pick three winners randomly and will post you the tickets. To be in with a chance of winning, you need to (1) be following MapLondon on Twitter, and (2) retweet our competition tweet (or this one). We’ll three winners at random and direct message you to let you know and find out where to post them to! Competition closes at 2pm on Tuesday. Good luck! Terms and conditions: This competition is only open to UK residents. The prizes are three sets of two complimentary passes to the show, for use on Friday or Sunday. The tickets do not have a cash value. There is no cash alternative. Winners will be contacted by a Twitter direct...

Here’s some arty maps of localities in London which have a distinctly culinary theme. “Edible Clapham” drawn by Lis Watkins and commissioned by Incredible Edible Lambeth – more a series of colourful, detailed drawings linked together by a walking route, it nonetheless is the map needed for a foodie tour of this trendy neighborhood: “Tootopia”, drawn by Lauren Radley and commisssioned for the Tootopia festival in Tooting, a vibrant map of the eateries and other food delights of the area: “Baking Tube Map”, drawn by Matt Brown of Londonist magazine – it’s another take on the tube map, with an impressive 300+ stations renamed as food puns. King’s Cross St Pancakes anyone? Found on the...

The latest pocket guide and fold-out map from boutique urban cartographers Herb Lester is “Punk London“, celebrating 40 years since the punk movement of the 1970s, by mapping key locations in central London where it happened. Mike Haddad is the carrtographer/designer. As with all Herb Lester maps it’s a proper, custom made and litho-printed map, with an eye-catching pink, grey and white colour palette. Researcher Paul Gorman has done his leg-work and identified 111 locations across the city, marked with black pins, so the accompanying A6 pocket guide runs to 28 pages, with the enclosed map folding out to A3: “Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s Sex shop at 430 Kings Road; the Hampstead flat shared by Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious; Saint Martin’s School Of Art, where the Sex Pistols made their debut performance; Pathway Studios in Canonbury, where The Damned recorded New Rose, the first UK punk release; The Clash’s Camden Town rehearsal space and many more locations associated with all the movement’s key figures.” It’s priced at a bargain £6 from the Herb Lester shop. Thanks to the heads-up from the Herb Lester team. Photos from their...

Crossrail is a massive new railway that is due to open towards the end of the decade. It’s underground in central London, so largely unseen – but Londoners will be familiar with the many, surprisingly large building sites across the route, as the stations and other infrastructure get built. We’ve featured Crossrail’s official construction map in a previous post, when it was showing the progress of the various TBMs (tunnel boring machines) drilling through London; but with the tunnels themselves now burrowed, it’s received a welcome update – if you zoom right in, you can now see the shape and extent of the underground stations. And they are HUGE, with some of the central London ones having different tube stations at each end. For example, the Liverpool Street Crossrail Station’s western entrance is actually at Moorgate, the next tube station along: Tottenham Court Road Crossrail Station is a particularly complex set of tunnelling, as it has to link with both the Central and Northern lines already there, while the new lines themselves are some way to the south of both of them. There’s also some short links for integrating with a future Crossrail 2 line, and the map includes the huge new ticket hall which has already opened – with passages to Crossrail blocked with blue walls until opening day in late 2018. Ironically, no part of the new station is actually on Tottenham Court Road, which runs away to the north from Oxford Street: Entrance to the new ticket hall, approximately where the “pond” is in the map above: Bond Street Crossrail Station also lies to the south of the existing tube station, so includes a link snaking north to it, as well as some additional mysterious tunnels even further north – possibly...

Lumiere London is a festival of light and art taking place every evening until this Sunday. From 6:30-10pm, nearly 30 temporary artworks in central London will come alive with lights. From a holographic elephant to neon sausage-dogs and a strange organic-looking structure suspended over London’s principal crossroads (Oxford Circus), it’s a great excuse to brave the cold weather – for tourists it’s extra to see in London’s traditionally quiet January, while for locals it’s an opportunity to get out to the city to see something impressive and free, to stave off the post-Christmas low. Most of the pieces are around the Regent Street, Piccadilly Circus and Trafalgar Square area, all of which are closed to regular traffic in the evening to provide more space for the crowds. Further away from the main zone, King’s Cross Central (the space going northwards from the gap between King’s Cross and St Pancras) has a line of lit artworks, while Westminster Abbey, to the west, is also precision-lit with a mosaic of colours. The organisers have released a couple of maps, one for the general central London area (below) and one for King’s Cross (extract above). In addition, TfL have released a special tube line walking-distance map (bottom) for the Lumiere areas. Tube stations are likely to be unusually busy, and bus routes suspended – the purpose of the last map is to emphasise that it’s really not that far walking between the tube stations in the vicinity. It’s great to see these proper maps being produced for the event (paper copies of the first two are available at some of the installations). They are attractive to look at and informative about what’s happening. All three are supplied as vector PDFs so they are nice and sharp at...

So, we thought yesterday’s post on Google Maps for Mobile was the last time we’d be mentioning Google Maps for a little while, but then this happened. Google has managed to turn the entire world, including much of London, into a Pac-Man game. Or rather, lots of Pac-Man games. Go to Google Maps right now, zoom into an area of interest (which needs to have a decent number of streets or tracks), and click the little Pac-Man box on the bottom left. Your current view gets turned into a Pac-Man game! You even get the classic sounds if you then click the speaker icon on the top left. Now you can go play Pac-Man based on the street layout of your childhood neighbourhood, your university campus, the centre of the last city you visited on holiday… If on mobile, the choices are more limited – you’ll need to zoom to the centre of a number of major cities rather than having free reign over most of the world. There are some clues in this help page, which also reveals that a Google red pin parker, and “Peg Man”, the Street View icon, are the top two “cherry” bonus objects that you might find. Chances are, this “April Fools” gift is only going to be around until the end of April 1, so get playing! Maps © Google and presumably Namco? Above: Trafalgar Square. Below: The Inner Circle of Regent’s Park....

Maps appear everywhere! I only recently featured the Craft Brewery Map of London so I was pleased to discover today that one of the featured breweries, Hammerton, which has only been brewing for a few weeks, actually has a map on the label for one of their beers, “N7” (named after the postcode that the brewery is in.) The map appears to be an extract from a small section of the A-Z, probably London’s most famous map (apart from the other one.) Hammerton Brewery are tucked away behind Caledonian Road & Barnsbury station, and have an Open Day on Saturday. The area (which I lived in for a couple of years) is full of really great pubs too, so I look forward to the beers appearing on tap soon. p.s. While researching this article I came across this rather lovely label for an unrelated beer, from the Austro-Bavarian Lager Beer Brewery in Tottenham, in 1884. It doesn’t have a map on it but does have an attractive graphic showing the brewery itself, which closed in 1903. The label is part of the British Library archive. Who said the British Library was just about books? Photos in this article are from the Hammerton...

The artist Katherine Baxter, who specialises in hand-drawn isometric generalised maps, particular of cities, has a solo exhibition “Mapmaker”, at the Coninsgby Gallery in Tottenham Street, Fitzrovia. The gallery is open from 9-6pm from Monday to Friday, and the exhibition is showing until 25 July. We’ve featured one of Katherine’s maps before – this map of the London 2012 Olympic venues which was a commission for LondonTown. Katherine’s illustration style is not just limited to maps – in fact her first commision was for a children’s book – but the geometric style lends itself well to creating information-rich graphics such as maps. See also this impressive video of the creation of a map of the procession for the Royal Wedding of 2011 (the finished work is below), it is three days of hand-drawing a map condensed to just three minutes. It makes you realise just how many strokes of the artist’s pen are needed to create an artwork/map of this detail and intricacy: Her full portfolio is on her website. More details about the solo exhibition. Thank you to Katherine for the invitation to her exhibition launch. The images here are from her website...

This animation shows how the roads in the London area formed, from Roman times through the industrial revolution and to the modern day. London’s boundary has expanded through the ages, and it’s interesting to see just how small the city was compared to its modern day size, as well as how the collection of villages around the capital developed, often in different waves, before being gradually subsumed into the modern-day Greater London. Protected buildings are show as yellow dots, glowing at the time that they first appear on the map. The work was created by a team, including Flora Roumpani, a Ph.D candidate at the Bartlett Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) at UCL who animated the video, and Dr Kiril Stanilov who was also based at CASA as a Marie Curie Fellow a few years back, as an expert on modelling the development of cities along their networks. The Museum of London’s Archaeology service supplied some of the historic data and Polly Hudson was the director and designer. The video was commissioned by English...

We were sent this lovely looking bespoke map by Adam Groffman, who runs regular eating tours in East London. Participants receive a paper copy of the map at the beginning of their tour, before sampling the cultural and culinary infusion of the area. Getting a map like this is a nice souvenir of an evening and no doubt enhances the experience (and whets the appetite). It certainly beats dots or circles placed on top of a Google Map screenshot or another generic base map. We really like the map as both a navigational piece and great example of cartography. It has the right balance of simplicity and detail – drawing out the venues while providing just enough other contextual detail, such as the main roads and stations, without crowding out the main work. The whimsical details are also rather nice – particularly the assortment of zoo animals heading out on the railway line towards Essex. The map was created by Simone Capano who’s also drawn a similar map for Rome. See also the Carte Blanc map which was produced last year, by a different author but with a related...

Maps of London appear in all sorts of unexpected places and on all kinds of objects. This year’s London Marathon finishers’ medal had an expected surprise for Mapping London, there is a map of the famous course engraved on the back of it. As well as a simplified outline of the 26.2 mile route, a number of the famous landmarks appear, as well as, of course, the River Thames, which is as ever the canonical symbol of the metropolis, serving to orientate a London-based map reader. The other side of the medal has a nice pseudo-3D view, in relief, of the City and Bankside. Receiving this unexpected London map was a bonus which was appreciated by your Mapping London running correspondent, it took away the pain a little bit as he finally crossed the finishing line, having failed to notice the many iconic London views near the end of the...

Here’s some of our favourite maps we’ve reviewed over last 12 months, and where you can buy them: Running with Crayons is a fantastic name for an artist’s portfolio, and we loved the beautiful and colourful hand-drawn maps of London we looked at in April. You can buy the maps of East London and South-East London, amongst others, at Tilly’s BigCartel Store.  Stephen Walter is selling a digital copy of his London hand-drawn maps, on an iPad app, Walterian London. We liked the Hub Map of London and London Subterranea particularly. See more about the app on the iTunes Store.  In July we reviewed a new reproduction box set of the A-Z 1938 London Street Atlas, which comes in an attractive case and is available through Amazon.  London Dissected is the fourth in the Curiocity series of quirky, and genuinely pocket sized, maps. Each one has a different theme, this one reimagines London as a human body. The map is packed with gory locations and related trivia. We reviewed it in August and you can get it, and the others in the series so far, at the Curiocity website.  Rocque’s Map of Georgian London is a modern reproduction of a 1746 map showing London in great detail. The reproduction comes in an attractively boxed set of four maps. We featured it in August and it’s on sale at Amazon.  David Fathers has created a poster of the Thames as it flows through London. See our review and buy it direct from the illustrator.  Last month we reviewed Craft Beer and Coffee Maps and you can get them from the Blue Crow Media shop, along with a Cocktail Bar map.  The Adventure Walks Map – we reviewed this just yesterday. Buy it here on Amazon. ...

  Almost all the maps we have featured to date have fallen neatly within the M25 but, of course, London’s influence extends well beyond this physical boundary. One of the most significant impacts resulting from London’s rise as a global city is the need for increasing numbers of people to fly in and out efficiently. With Heathrow at capacity there, have been a series of high profile plans to build new airports along the Thames Gateway and in the Thames Estuary. This map, commissioned by the the Museum of London, shows five of the proposals made in the past few years and places them in the context of the surrounding environment, including nature reserves and hazards. The reason for including the SS Richard Montgomery is that it contains around 1,400 tonnes of explosives from the Second World War. If these were to explode it would make for a pretty big bang. Despite being adjacent to one of the UK’s busiest shipping lanes this hasn’t happened so far…   The Estuary Airport display is at the Museum of London Docklands, as part of Estuary, a free exhibition of contemporary art which presents the work of 12 artists – each of whom have been inspired by the outer limits of the River Thames. You can see an interesting video about the artists and artworks...

UCL has opened a “pop-up” shop called Launchbox in Box Park Shoreditch which is designed to showcase “the hottest new designs emerging from UCL’s creative scene”. Ollie and I have had a few of our maps printed as posters which are available to purchase alongside other works from UCL staff and students. Colleagues in CASA have also been involved in linking the products to the Tales of Things website that encourages a more interactive shopping experience by letting customers tag and upload their thoughts about each item. The website also enables access to additional media, such as videos explaining each product. Here is me talking about the Twitter language map poster available in the shop. It may not seem that way but I am very excited about seeing it in print!   Ollie also has a version of his “Electric Tube” map for sale if you are interested in picking up a very abstract version of the Tube map…   The shop will be open until the end of June and is well worth a visit.  ...

I somehow missed, until now, this set of oblique-projected maps of popular parts of central London (thanks Chris Pearson for the tip!) They were produced for the Big Easter Egg Hunt in April last year. Each of the maps were of areas where Fabergé eggs were “hidden”. Most of the 12 maps were of small areas, so you didn’t have to explore a huge area in order to discover the eggs. However the Canary Wharf map, featured above, covers a much bigger area. (I’ve also included a bit of the City map, below. They might not be the easiest maps to use for regular navigation, but the style is attractive, with a nice pastel colour-set, and the oblique projection gives them a different feel to both the top-down (paper-map style) and isometric (SimCity style) maps which are more common. You can see all the maps here although unfortunately the mobile version of the website doesn’t display the list of maps, and, we found, persists even when you pass your mobile browser as a desktop one! So, one to view on a regular computer. What I would love is this style of map covering the whole of central...

This is a view from the LondonTown Christmas Map. While it is essentially just “pins on a map” map with a number of icons relating to various seasonal attractions in town, it is presented very nicely and is of course very topical. You can toggle on and off sets of icons to view locations of carol services, Santa grottos, ice rinks, Christmas fairs, pantos and so on. There’s also a New Year attractions icon. LondonTown (we’ve featured them before) are using a very attractive custom OpenStreetMap-based map, using Leaflet and MapBox, as their background. After the familiar orange and green tones of the standard Google Maps map and/or the red and brown colours of the vanilla OpenStreetMap map (fine as they are), used for countless “pins on a map” maps, it is nice to see a fresh, clean background like this being used. The icons themselves are also nicely done and the site, while rather simple in terms of its layer switching and positioning options, looks attractive. Merry Christmas! Design/icons by LondonTown, background map data OpenStreetMap...

Crossrail are currently building a new deep-level railway line right across the heart of London. The mega-project recently launched the first two of their tunnel boring machines (TBMs), going from Paddington to Farringdon – there will be several more, for smaller drives across east London. They’ve produced a “live” map powered by Ordnance Survey OpenSpace, which shows the current location of the huge TBM “trains”, their total distance travelled, and their projected path over the next month. So far Phyllis has bored 881m through subterranean London, while Ada has just got going and is 51m in. The maps appear to be updated every few days. Panning to the right reveals the future detailed alignment of the tunnels, sometimes diverging quite far from each other, such as at the curve around the bottom of Tottenham Court Road. Have a look at the live map and click on one of the two blue TBM “flags” to zoom in and see its location in detail. The background mapping is © Crown copyright and database rights 2012 Ordnance...

The A-Z is probably the most famous London Atlas – it’s been around for over 75 years, and has been updated ever since. The company recently launched a trio of London 2012 maps – a pocket-sized fold-out map of the Olympic Park, a slightly larger one with detailed maps of each London venue, and an A4 book – the venues atlas – with maps and information on every one of the 30+ venues hosting an event. The cartography of the maps is nice and clear. The traditional A-Z maps are very busy with detail – with every road shown – but by having a dedicated map for a single venue, it allows more space to present the information in an uncluttered way. The designated station for each venue is prominently shown, along with the route to/from it. Local non-Olympic tourist attractions are also mentioned in the larger map and the book. I particularly like the book – partly because it goes into each venue in great detail – many are given four pages in the book, with detailed travel notes – but mainly because it is presented very nicely and is as much a souvenir as the official games programme is, for those with a more cartographical persuasion. In fact it wouldn’t look too bad on a coffee table, as long as you don’t mind the predominant pink colouring and jagged writing that has become synonymous with London 2012. All three maps state that they are an “Official Product of London 2012” and have an “XXX Olympiad” hologram on the back. Definitely recommended for the Olympic tourist – particularly if you visiting more than one venue during these games. Thank you to The Geographer’s A-Z Map Company for sending me a copy of the...

Next time you are passing through a station keep an eye out for a “London Summer 2012” map. It is a similar style to the “Why not Walk it Maps?”  we featured previously, but covers most of central London and all the Olympic Park. The maps feature key landmarks, the locations of Olympics related events (such as London Live) and shops, a selection of interesting museums and also more practical information such as public amenities, police stations and NHS walk in centres. The maps also include 6 discovery trails (round trips) to help explore different areas (such as the City; Spitalfields and Brick Lane; Regent’s Park; and the West End). Transport is also well covered and includes bus routes alongside points of interest to hopefully encourage people to stay above ground (no information on Barclays bikes though*). Being a map-lover these could be the best (free!) Olympics souvenir I have spotted so far and I expect they will be a useful momento for Londoner’s and visitors alike. *The cynic in me thinks this may be because Barclays aren’t an official...

The Mind the Map exhibition, at the London Transport Museum, doesn’t only feature historic maps, such as Beck’s “joke map” that we covered before. This extract above is a photo of on of the new art commissions for the exhibition. It’s called The Proustian Map of London – The Land of Hopeful Commuters. It’s a work by Agnes Poitevin-Navarre and consists of a minimalistic map of the London boroughs and postcode districts, on which are interspersed various comments by commuters. The locations of each comment correspond to the postcode of the person who made the comment. Comments were solicited via the Transport Museum website and other sources. The question that was to be answered was “Where do you hope to be?”. My own comment is above, comparatively alone – much of the empty space nearby is due to the Olympic Park and Victoria Park. It’s interesting looking at the spatial distribution of responses – perhaps giving an indication of where the younger, social-media savvy, connected demographic of London lives. Camden and Islington have many comments crammed together, while Richmond, Newham and Barking & Dagenham are sparse. The map is displayed on a giant cylindrical section in the upstairs part of the exhibition, with the northern half of London taking up one 180-degree section and southern London on the other...

It’s lovely to see a brand new hand-drawn map of London in this age of computer-generated graphics. This one has been produced by Michael Hill of Maps Illustrated for this week’s TV Guide and shows the Diamond Jubilee procession route up Whitehall and down The Mall. The effort stands in marked contrast to the maps produced for the festivities over the weekend that have relied on Google. The processional route map on the official website demonstrated uses Google Earth (plus some suitably regal music). Whilst, the map used on the official website for the Thames Pageant (another part of the Diamond Jubilee celebrations) uses an underwhelming standard Google Map – it’s not even styled to match the red, white and blue theme of the the event or indeed the rest fo the website. The cartography of the standard Google Map is great for general travel around London, but for a special occasion like this, the map could have been so much more. Thanks to Michael Hill for letting us know on Twitter about the map. His blog article includes a higher-resolution...

The same day that James received a historic picture map of London that we eventually dated to around 1908, mainly based on the appearance of the 1908 Olympic Stadium in what is now White City, we noticed a Tweet from Collins about a new book that they had produced in conjunction with Mapseeker Archive Publishing. The book is “A Guide to London 1908” and has just been published. 1908, of course, being the first time the Olympics came to London, and we are less than two months from the third time, so a timely publishing. The book, the result of an impressively detailed trawl of historial archives, mainly focuses on the Games and includes various prints of Olympic tickets, route maps and rules for competitors and events. It also has some more general London memorabilia from the year, including a list of hotels, bus routes and cab fares, and a gazetteer of interesting places to visit for the 1908 tourist. The highlight for is a map of the 1908 Olympic Marathon route, from Windsor Castle to the stadium, the first time I’ve seen such a map. The map has been painstakingly reconstructed from scratch, based on the old and very much degraded original mapping. An accompaning historic document mentions that a “gun or rocket” would be fired at the 24th, 25th and 26th mile marker. This was the first marathon to be 26 miles and 385 yards, and very much set the standard. Now I’ve heard both from people saying that the marathon was specially extended by 385 yards to finish in front of the Royal Box, and from others that say this is apocryphal. The book has a good go at putting the stories to rest once and for all – it has...

We featured the first official Olympic Park map at the beginning of the year, and it has already received an update which now includes pictures of the major buildings and locations of the sponsor marquees. Now, the recently revamped London 2012 website includes an interactive map, with flags showing the various events taking place around London. The flags are overlaid on a Microsoft Virtual Earth map, the resulting effect is not particularly pretty but does serve to show the extent of Olympics-related activities taking place right across the capital. In the Olympic Park area itself, the map has received an overlay, to hide Microsoft’s current rather bare representation of the area and superimpose the new buildings, bridges and walkways. The map reveals some detail additional to the previous two, such as the location of the Hockey warm-up facility, and the name of the bridge between the Copper Box and the Basketball Arena – Channelsea Crossing. The map is © Crown Copyright and database right 2012 Ordnance...

This post was going to appear on Friday but I’ve brought it forward as tickets are rapidly disappearing – 2/3rds of them have already been snapped up. Our research lab here at UCL, CASA (the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis), is organising a one-day conference on 20 April, at the University of London. It will include an exhibition showcasing some of CASA’s latest work, as well as a number of talks from CASA researchers, and keynotes from Professor Carlo Ratti, director of MIT’s Senseable Cities lab, Professor Mike Batty, the department’s chair and Dr Andy Hudson-Smith, the department’s director. Both authors of Mapping London, James and Ollie, will also be presenting some visual research. The conference organiser is George MacKerron, of Mappiness fame. Tickets are free and are now available on EventBrite. The graphic contains Ordnance Survey data which is Crown Copyright...

The Mapping London blog is 1 year today! We launched on February 24, 2011. To celebrate, today we are featuring Google Maps, and how it currently looks like for the UCL campus in Bloomsbury, Central London, where the Mapping London authors are based. I think it wouldn’t be much of an exaggeration to say that Google Maps pretty much kicked off web mapping as we know it today. It certainly popularised the concept of a “slippy map”, a map which fills the whole browser window, which you can drag around and easily zoom in and out of with the flick of a scroll wheel. Remember those little web maps you used to get in a postcard sized window, and you had to click a little button to move the map to the east? Google hasn’t stopped innovating and adding to Google Maps though. It’s trying out MapsGL, a WebGL-based new technology which gives the mapping data to your web browser and then lets it do the rendering. For parts of central London, including the UCL campus, building outlines have been added in, allowing for a pseudo-3D effect. In the MapsGL version, shown above, shadows have been added. Lots of extra layers can be added in – live traffic information for the bigger roads, underground route maps, bus stops, and extra information on many items is just a click away. I’ve clicked on the “Jeremy Bentham” in the screenshot above, which reveals it currently has three stars and some other attributes about the pub. Google also finally own their mapping data for the UK – they aren’t licensing it from other providers any more. This gives them the freedom to do some really interesting things with it – I look forward to further enhancements! An...

LOCOG (The London Organising Committee for the Olympic Games) yesterday released a new map of the key Olympic Park in east London, as part of their 200-days-to-go celebrations. They also detailed new games-mode names for several of the venues, entrances and key roads in the park, such as London Way (the only such named road in London, apparently), Victoria Gate, Victoria Walk (aka the Hackney Wick bit of the Greenway) and the Copper Box, the latter being a rather appropriate name for the Handball Arena. Eton Manor Transport Hub used to be known as East Marsh – part of Hackney Marshes. There is also a World Square and an Orbit Circus, neither areas look particularly square or circular, but maybe tiling on the ground will rectify this. Anyway it is a nicely done map with some clear cartography and good colour usage (I particularly like the slightly pastel theming), once you realise that northwards is pointing to the left… As I live very locally to the site, I particularly appreciate such maps, as they lift the lid on what’s happening in the park, beyond what I can see through the tall perimeter fences. By way of comparison I have included another map below, which is the latest Ordnance Survey Street View map provided as part of its Open Data initiative, of the same area. I’ve rotated it so that northwards is also leftwards. This map is slightly older and the range of features included in the Open Data product is restricted. Path detail, in particular, is missing. Both maps are © Crown Copyright and database right 2011 Ordnance Survey. Both can be clicked on to view a larger version. A higher quality PDF of the top map can be found by following the links...

Mapping London editors James and Ollie look back at some of the many maps produced each year in London to highlight the highs and lows of London life. As you can see there was more to 2011 than riots and Royal Weddings: hand drawn maps have never been so popular, nor have those showing transport and people’s use of social media. So before we head into 2012, take a moment to enjoy 2011’s cartographic delights. January: Congestion Charge Shrinkage The Mayor of London removed the Congestion Charge’s Western Extension (WEZ), shrinking the zone back to its original area east of Park Lane. Map Copyright: Transport for London February: Tweets in London UCL CASA researchers Steven Gray and Oliver O’Brien produced a heatmap of London, based on geolocated Twitter data, collected through February. Certain geographical features of London appear simply by looking at where people were tweeting from. Contains data from Twitter, OpenStreetMap and Ordnance Survey Open Data (Boundary-Line). March: Anti-Cuts March In March there was a huge march against the government’s spending cuts, with an estimated 250,000 taking part. The Guardian produced this map of the planned route. Bonus Map: The Index of Multiple Deprivation 2010 was published in March. UCL Geography student Chris Gale mapped the data for London as a cartogram, distorting the areas to more properly represent the population in them. The full version on his site allows for a “swipe” comparison between the cartogram version and the geographical one, showing an apparent correlation between highly populated areas and areas with relatively high deprivation. Map produced by Chris Gale. Contains boundary data which is Crown Copyright and data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS). April: The Royal Wedding The Royal Parks produced a beautiful 3D map showing the route of...

Mapping London Life is the title of the talk I gave at a great event organised by the Londonist and hosted by TAG Fine Arts. Surrounded by the wonderful maps in “The Art of Mapping” exhibition and speaking alongside John Kennedy and Stephen Walter the audience and I were in good company for 90 minutes of London map talk. For those who missed it I have included some of the slides, maps and videos that I talked about in my presentation. I have only been able to include those we have formally released so I am afraid one or two are missing. First up was a map of London Bollards. I used this to demonstrate that even though John Kennedy’s Bollards of London blog may seem a bit fanatical to you and I, he is not alone in his interests. All the bollards on the map below have been voluntarily mapped as part of the OpenStreetMap project. The map was produced using a great new tool called GEMMA (soon to be released) developed at CASA. Next up I showed a couple of maps that demonstrate my personal interest in some of the social issues affecting Londoners. The first illustrates the great educational divide in the city. Each Borough has been scaled by the number of children who took GCSEs in 2010 and then coloured by their grades. The map below shows a similar divide in the cuts to London Boroughs announced late last year. The Boroughs this time have been scaled by the number of children living in poverty. Next up were a couple of snapshots, featured in the Times Atlas of London, of the interactive map of London surnames I produced earlier this year. Click on the image to go to the map itself. After this...

Readers may be interested in the London Mapping Festival, a grouping of several events relating to mapping in London, that takes place over the next year. The launch event is at the British Computer Society in central London, in the evening of Monday 6 June. More details can be found on the London Mapping Festival...

The Nike Grid was an Alternative Reality Game (ARG) for runners, held over two weeks on the streets of London late last year. After each day’s race, W+K, the campaign planners, produced a stunning infographic video showing that day’s runs, superimposed on a map. The routes were heavily stylised as hexagonal traces, as was the map itself. Coloured hexagonal flashes were used to indicate the end of a successful run. Each day’s infographic was themed differently – one highlighting the runs through heavy rain on evening, another showing the routes of the runners that had been around the entire map. You can see all the videos on the Nike Grid YouTube page and also a blog post with more on the game. The background mapping is from the OpenStreetMap database, which is CC-By-SA OpenStreetMap...