The epic graphic novel entitled “From Hell” is summarised in the following way:

“An unflinching recreation of Jack the Ripper’s mutilation of five Whitechapel prostitutes in 1888 is the core of this graphic novel. Jack acts as “midwife to the 20th century”, delivering the next 100 years of Holocaust, serial killing and media rapaciousness as he extracts his last victim’s heart.”

If reading it isn’t harrowing enough, you can now follow in Jack the Ripper’s footprints thanks to Martin Zaltz-Austwick and Stephan Hugel (two of our colleagues at CASA) who walked one of the routes described in the book and produced the map above. Martin describes the expedition “as a cross between Iain Sinclair and Sir Clive Sinclair”….

It is all part of the UCL Festival of the Arts - an event we would really recommend.

As a followup to last week’s post about university campus maps in London, my attention was drawn to the Middlesex University campus map which I had overlooked.

This was unfortunate, as it is far and away the best London university campus map I’ve seen. It’s in 2D, and uses a little bit of 3D to emphasise the key building, without overusing the effect. It ticks all the boxes for good design – particularly, it’s a good use of a select set of colours, which don’t overwhelm the map, Arrows discretely show access points, the main one shown with a slightly larger arrow. Trees are shown as an attractive blend of translucent circles. The symbols are well thought out, and include the “official” tube, train and cycle logos.

Extract of the map which is “Redrawn from Ordnance Survey with permission of HMSO © Crown Copyright 2010. All rights reserved. London Borough of Barnet 100017674. Cartography by Steer Davies Gleave 2011.”

I was talking to the UCL cartographer recently and he mentioned that there aren’t many dedicated cartographers left at universities these days. A traditional task of the university cartographer is putting the campus map together, so I thought I would take a look at the different campus maps that the London universities make available, to see how they compare and whether some are suffering from the lack of professional cartographical input.

I focused on the “print” versions here, typically available on each university’s website as a downloadable PDF, rather the online/interactive version which is often Google Maps-based. I looked at the map for each university’s main campus, and only picked some of the larger universities in London – there are many more, scattered throughout the metropolis.

Five of the best

Greenwich

As befitting the university with the largest undergraduate population in London, Greenwich’s has had some care taken with its design – it’s polished and very attractive. It is in 3D, which is normally bad, but it is spaced out and simplified enough for the effect to work. Long labels are generally kept off the map and in the key.

UEL

UEL’s map is rather eye-catching. It’s pleasant to look at and there’s some nice quirks, such as a rowing boat on the water. The DLR station and bus stop logos are very definitely unofficial though! (N.B. north points down).

UCL

UCL’s (above) has a distinctive design with good use of colour. It looks great in print, although unfortunately the PDF version is a raster rather than a vector. It does have a slightly overwhelming number of labels though – with the heavy font further emphasising them. Disclaimer: The author works at UCL.

Imperial

Imperial’s is also clear, although quite heavy on the red lines. The TfL roundels look rather unofficial though (this could probably be said for most of the maps studied here.)

City

City’s map is simple but attractive, with a good use of colour.

Five that could be better

Kingston

Kingston’s is presented in isometric perpsective (pseudo-3D.) It’s reasonably clear to look at although the perspective makes it difficult to see quads and routes through the campus. The symbols also are rather ugly too.

LSBU

London South Bank University’s map is simple – too simple. It just shows zones rather than building outlines. It’s also, for some reason, using the London Bus symbol for the tube stations.

King’s

King’s has a bright, clear design, but is not particularly detailed. Having so many different colours for the buildings also is a bit overwhelming. It’s rather hard to find on the university’s website. However it is a vector PDF, so looks great on screen.

LSE

LSE’s could be a lot better. It is presented in pseudo-3D, but this adds little to the legibility, and the white text and excessive use of acronyms is unattractive.

London Met

London Met’s is not great at all. Very little detail and very small scale. The use of purple is overbearing. The Docklands logo used is at least 18 years out of date!

Westminster

Westminster University doesn’t seem to have campus maps online. I could only find this old relic…

All of the maps which are featured here are copyright of their respective universities.

Here is an animation that Ollie created a couple of years ago for the “Sense and the City” exhibition at the London Transport Museum. We did a feature on this at the time but I thought it was well worth another post now that the animation has been viewed over 30,000 times in the past couple of weeks! The map shows the touch-ins (going into the network) and touch-outs (leaving the network) of Oyster cards at London’s tube and train stations, including a few beyond the Greater London boundary which still accept . As the animation moves forwards in 10-minute intervals during the typical weekday, the balance between touch-ins and touch-outs is shown by a colour scale. Red indicates the great majority of taps are touch-ins, and green indicates mainly touch-outs. White is the “neutral” colour, indicating that roughly as many people are entering the network as leaving it, at that period in time.

All credit to “trailerchecker” on YouTube who noticed 23 missing touch ins/ outs in the video! Nice to see we are not the only Tube data fanatics out there…

These two artwork maps (East London above, and South-East London below) were created by Brighton artist Tilly of Running for Crayons, for the Observer newspaper and a local exhibition. The maps are embellished with a mixture of local landmarks, corporate logos, postcode dots and characters drawn in the artist’s signature style. Some locations I know well are on the maps – Hackney City Farm and The Dove being a couple of personal favourites. Animals make a prominent appearance, including the ever-present pigeons. I like the Isle of Dogs heaving with animals.

The images are © Tilly of Running for Crayons.

Last week I noticed a black and white maze on the wall next to the lifts at Caledonian Road station, it had a red cross and was numbered as if it were part of a series. After a bit of web searching (and then the discovery of a pamphlet) I found out it was one of 270 artworks by Mark Wallinger. The works entitled “Labyrinth” have been commissioned as part of TfL’s celebrations for 150 years of the London Underground. These pieces “drawing on the language of maps” encourage people to trace the labyrinth’s “single meandering path into the centre and back out again” with their finger, the idea being that it reflects a journey on the Tube network. There will be a Labyrinth installed in every station on the network (hence 270 of them). To add an extra bit of Tube geekery, the order in which they are numbered is the order of stations visited by the Guinness World Record holders (Andi James, Martin Hazel, and Steve Wilson) for the fastest time taken to pass through every station on the network. For more information (and a video) see the project’s website.

You can currently spot the artworks at the stations below (although this list will be out of date as more become installed. For an up to date list see here.

Alperton, Angel, Archway, Arsenal, Baker Street, Bank, Belsize Park, Bermondsey, Blackhorse Road, Borough, Bounds Green, Burnt Oak, Caledonian Road, Camden Town, Canada Water, Canary Wharf, Canning Town, Canons Park, Clapham Common, Clapham North, Clapham South, Covent Garden, Dollis Hill, Edgware, Embankment, Finchley Central, Finchley Road, Finsbury Park, Golders Green, Green Park, Goodge Street, Hampstead, Hatton Cross, Heathrow 1, 2, 3, Hendon Central, High Barnet, Highgate, Hounslow Central, Hounslow East, Hounslow West, Kentish Town, Kilburn, King’s Cross St Pancras, Kingsbury, London Bridge, Manor House, Mill Hill East, Neasden, North Greenwich, Old Street, Oval, Oxford Circus, Park Royal, Queensbury, St James Park, St John’s Wood, Seven Sisters, South Harrow, South Wimbledon, Stanmore, Stratford, Stockwell, Sudbury Hill, Swiss Cottage, Tottenham Court Road, Tottenham Hale, Totteridge & Whetstone, Tufnell Park, Turnpike Lane, Victoria, Walthamstow Central, Waterloo, Wembley Park, West Finchley, West Ham, West Hampstead, Westminster, Willesden Green.

Images are Copyright Thierry Bal 2013.

Here’s a map of Zone 1 London (concentrating on the tube lines) constructed with sprites from the old-skool (80s!) console game Super Mario Bros 3. Take off the stress of navigating across the central part of London’s tube network by imagining you are a computer sprite!

If you like this style, see also 8-Bit London.

Seen on the London Subreddit. Created by and copyright NaturalBeats.

David Ryan Robinson has produced this amazingly detailed hand drawn “map” of London. It was originally produced as a silk screen print and depicts a densely packed view of London with landmarks you’ll recognise alongside some slightly fantastical looking creatures. We are big fans of this, especially for its muted colours, detailed labels (you need to look closely for these) and many surprises.

Here is part of a map, The Map of Roman Britain, Second Edition, published by the Ordnance Survey in 1931 and scanned by Bibliographics. The extract above shows the area taken roughly up by the modern Greater London conurbation, along with the surrounding area. The black triangles and circles show known Roman villas and other settlements, while the lines show the main Roman roads at the presumed height of the Roman occupation of Britain – dotted lines show where the road route is not known exactly at the time of the map’s production. The patterns of dots/circles show wooded areas.

The eight roads shown, clockwise from the north, are:

• Ermine Street (sometimes Erming Street), heading north to Lindum (Lincoln). Now the A10/Kingsland Road.
• A track heading north-east from the Lea (at Stratford) through Epping Forest.
• A road heading east to Caesaromagus (Chelmsford) and Camulodumum (Colchester). Starts at what is now Old Street, then Hackney Road and Old Ford and maybe Roman Road, then the A118. Crosses Ermine Street at Shoreditch.
• Watling Street, heading south-east to Rochester, Durovernum (Canterbury) and Dover. Now the A2.
• A road heading south to Burgess Hill – little trace exists.
• Stane Street (sometimes Stone Street), heading south-west to Chichester, via Alfoldean (quite near Horsham).
• Portway, heading west starting along Farringdon Road and Oxford Street, then through Pontes (Staines) towards Calleva Atrebatum (Silchester).
• Watling Street, heading north-west to Verulamium (St Albans). Starts on Park Lane/Marble Arch, at the junction with Portway, and runs along the A5/Edgware Road and A5183.

London Bridge is also visible, the only bridged crossing of the River Thames near London at the time. The next bridge upstream is at Pontes/Staines.

The Ordnance Survey has produced several further editions since, with very different styles, but there is something very attractive about this particular one. The sixth (2011) edition – Roman Britain (Historical Map and Guide) – is available from Amazon.

Extract from the scan by Bibliographics.

Ed Manley (UCL Geomatic Engineering) produced this great map of private hire vehicles in London (note my avoidance of the “T” word). He was able to obtain the GPS tracks from a large company’s fleet of drivers. There are 700,000 journeys on this map with the most popular roads in red, falling to orange, yellow, white then grey. As Ed says:

“The most popular routes are along Euston Road, Park Lane and Embankment, which may be somewhat expected, but make for a stark constrast with respect to the flow of most traffic in London.  The connection with Canary Wharf comes out strongly, an indication of the company’s portfolio, though route choice here is interesting with selection of the The Highway more popular than Commercial Road.”

He is still crunching the numbers as part of his PhD research so we look forward to what he comes up with when it’s finished!

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 London.

This work, by Curious Maps, is a typographical map of London, with each area replaced with words representing a (stereo)typical dish for that area. My initial reaction on hearing of the idea was that surely there weren’t that many such location-specific dishes, apart from the obvious – Brick Lane curries/salt beef, Whitechapel’s jellied eels. The map has done well though to fill the London area with food, with doner kebabs up the A10, and distinctly rural sounding meals on the urban fringe – although you might not agree with the food for your local area! I particularly like the “club sandwich” for the City, while the Mapping London offices are surrounded by “Beer” and “Pizza” which is pretty accurate actually. Notice the Thames is the one natural geographical feature that still appears in this map entirely composed of text. The Thames should indeed appear in all London maps!

There are other food maps on the publisher’s website, including one for Great Britain.

Thanks to Jeremy Cope of CuriousMaps for sending us a review copy.

When we started the Mapping London one of our “ground rules” was not to turn it into a blog about Tube maps. On the 150th birthday of the London Underground, we are happy to make an exception. Here are some of our favourite maps and data visualisations about the World’s first underground railway.

First London Underground Spoof Map

Before his famous diagram was widely accepted, Harry Beck himself tackled some of his critics head on (who thought it looked too much like a circuit diagram)  by producing a version adopting many of the standard electrical components found on a circuit diagram. An aerial and earth appears, and the Bakerloo line becomes “Bakerlite”. The map appeared in London Transport’s internal staff magazine in 1933.

Tube Map Circuit Board

Perhaps inspired by the Beck circuit board map,  Yuri Suzuki‘s has created a London Underground Circuit Map Radio.

The Fantastical World of MacDonald Gill

This is an extract of a map produced in 1928 for London Transport by Macdonald Gill. He produced many maps in this “flowery” style – a world away from the straight lines and diagrams of Beck that were to come just a few years later.

London Underground in Detail

The complexity of London’s tunnels and stations is revealed by Franklin Jarrier’s super detailed map.

Just How Far Can the Tube Take You?

The scale of the London Underground network is hard to comprehend. The map above shows the total distances travelled by the Tube’s rolling stock in during the peak times alone!

A Week in the Life of the London Underground

It is not just the distances travelled by the carriages that is remarkable, the billions of journeys completed each year could not have been anticipated by the Tube’s early pioneers. Jon Reades’ graphic above depicts the flows of passengers through every station (based on Oyster Card touch ins/outs) across the network in a typical week.

Pulse of the City

Jon has also used Oyster card data to produce this animation that has passengers pulsing through the Tube like blood in arteries.

Typographic Tube Map

Fadeout design have simplified the Tube map even further to create this great typographic map. The lines look like they are drawn in charcoal but they actually comprise the station names.

Tube Map Sticky Tape

A horrendous distortion perhaps, but an excellent way of wrapping gifts for London Underground enthusiasts.

Lives on the Line

Nearly all Londoner’s are familiar with the Underground network, so it offers a great way of increasing the relevance and impact of often abstract datasets. Here we use it to chart life expectancy.

Bring Back the Thames

Back in 2009 the designers at TfL triggered public outcry by removing the Thames from the map. The successful campaign to put the Thames back, alongside other failed attempts make big changes in the map’s appearance, demonstrated Londoner’s love of the original Beck design and its crucial role as part of the Tube’s identity.

Google Doodle!

And finally, Google has replaced their normal logo with a special “Doodle” for today, celebrating the anniversary. The graphic is a stylised version of the iconic tube map, with the lines warped to form the letters (and colours) of the normal Google logo, but retaining much of the topological structure of the London tube network.

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 contributors.

The London Blitz, from 1940-1941, was a traumatic event that changed London’s landscape for ever. Until now, maps of the impact sights from the bombs falling on the city, have remained in paper form and have only been available to view when travelling to public archives, or through specialist planning consultancies. We have featured one such map on this website a few months ago. Now, researchers from the University of Portsmouth and UCL, funded by JISC, have released a new website, Bomb Sight, which has digitised the impact locations and plotted them on modern and historical maps. Initially you’ll see clusters of red dots across the city – on zooming in the dots turn clickable and you’ll be able to find out additional information about each bomb and the impact it had on the area. There are three filters – you can view the first night, first week or the whole period. There is also an application available shortly for Android-based smartphones, developed by Geobits, which shows an augmented reality view – you can walk through the streets holding your phone, and it overlays the locations of nearby impact sites on your view of your current street, as it was 70 years ago.

The effort to accurately digitise maps like these is far from trivial and it is an impressive example of discovering a public interest in information like this by making it readily viewable. The site received very heavy attention from the mainstream media earlier this week, so we have delayed featuring this map until now, the site is now accessible and responsive after having suffered somewhat from a different kind of impact – enthusiasm – earlier.

Congratulations to the Bomb Sight team and I look forward to further spatial data analyses of this fascinating and unique historical dataset, particularly as, in time, the data will be available for research by other academics and non-profits.

Ever thought the ribbon of the River Thames, weaving its way through London, looks a little like the band of the Milky Way galaxy, streaking across the night sky? Me neither, but it’s a novel idea that has inspired “Issue C” of Curiocity, an occasional series of maps of London quirks and novelties. Thanks to the team for sending me a copy of the map which I promptly lost – in its folded state it is exceedingly small (about an inch wide and three inches tall) so the photo of the map here is from their website. Unfolding the map reveals a circular plot, seemingly of stars, joined together to form constellations, and the aforementioned galaxy – on looking closer the points reveal themselves as various London landmarks, attractions and views to be enjoyed during the hours of darkness – orange stars highlight particular places to see at sunrise. Key night-bus routes are drawn on, to link groups together. The back of the map contains detail on the locations featured.

It’s certainly one of the more abstract – and minimalist – maps of London we’ve seen, but it’s nice to see a fresh, new map of London, drawn in such a novel way. Don’t use it for general navigation, but use it to inspire a late night wander. You can by it online or from select bookshops in central London.

The map was created by Mike Hall and the Curiocity editors.

We’ve featured at least three maps since the last one derived from the tube network, so we must be due for another interpretation of London’s most famous map, and here is an innovative one – Yuri Suzuki‘s London Underground Circuit Map Radio. It’s a working radio, with a printed circuit board (PCB) of the tube network (and river) in copper. Components are attached to the network in strategic locations. Stations names are included – most unchanged but a few with an electrical pun on their name – Beck Street, Piccadilly Circuit, Earl’s Coil and so on. An FM aerial is attached to a hidden auxiliary “line” near the northern end of the Piccadilly line, while an AM aerial is attached to the river near Heathrow. The above link has more detailed photographs of the artwork and an overall view.

The map was inspired by Harry Beck’s own joke map which was a circuit diagram based on his own tube map, and which we’ve featured here before – it was part of the Transport Museum’s recent Mind the Map exhibition. Yuri took the next logical step and created a properly working radio based on the tube map. It can be viewed at the Design Museum in London – Yuri is the current Designer in Residence – until mid-January 2013.

You can see the artist talking about the creation on this Design Museum video.

Photo © Hitomi Kai Yoda. Hat-tip to the London Underground Blog and IanVisits.

Last week Ed Manley and I published a map showing the top 10 twitter languages in London. To our surprise it made it to page 3 of the Metro (the next day was a monkey that looks like Einstein, so we are in good company) and was picked up by many of the national newspapers and science press. With all the hype surrounding the basic map we wanted to do something extra special for the mappinglondon blog, so Ollie has worked his web-mapping magic to create a fully interactive version in order that you can see the landmarks and streets the tweets correspond to. The map contains the geographic locations of about 3.3 million geo-located tweets (based on GPS) coloured by the language detected using Google’s translation tools.They cover the summer period so we can clearly see the many languages of the Olympic Park (a hotspot for tweeting). English tweets (grey) dominate (unsurprisingly) and they provide crisp outlines to roads and train lines as people tweet on the move. Towards the north, more Turkish tweets (blue) appear, Arabic tweets (green) are most common around Edgware Road and there are pockets of Russian tweets (pink) in parts of central London. The geography of the French tweets (red) is perhaps most surprising as they appear to exist in high density pockets around the centre and don’t stand out in South Kensington (an area with the Institut Francais, a French High School and the French Embassy). I really like the paint-speckled effect that the multilingual tweets of London have produced and it offers a further confirmation of the international nature of London’s population. There are more subtle things to look out for such as an almost perfect outline for the Olympic Stadium

and also the individual Heathrow terminals.

There are of course many extra ways we can visualise the data and it only represents the people that use twitter and have their locations switched on. This clearly doesn’t apply to the majority of Londoners so this is not a complete picture of London’s linguistic groups. Still, it makes for a nice looking map with lots to explore!

Rentonomy, who describe themselves as, for now, “an easy-to-use site that looks at London in a totally new way and gives you all the tools you need to find the right area for you”, have got some nice heatmaps of some London attributes, such as average rental values, crime rates (shown above) and average council tax. Each area consists of a few postcode sectors (e.g. E9 5xx, E9 6xx) grouped together, and is shown on the map as a simple rectangle in approximately the correct geographic position. The totemic river is also included – an essential for any London map – and that’s it. Simple but effective.

It’s similar to, but not quite, a cartogram map because the area of each rectangle is varied simply for aesthetic rather than quantitative reasons. Exact geographical boundary shapes are meaningless and unrecognisable to most people (except perhaps the Greater London Authority boundary) so doing away with them is no bad thing, while keeping the overall topological relationships between each area is also key.

They have also developed their own metrics for each area, such as transport accessibility, based on travel time from train/tube stations, the number of coffee shops and bars in an area, and so on. The demographics are presented in a clear, attractive format. Finally, they have a regularly updated blog with more interesting metrics and maps – such as which tubestations are busier at weekends than weekdays – another revealing metric for an area.

Screenshot, of crime rates, from the Rentonomy website.

A book, by author and illustrator David Fathers, has recently been published, on the Regent’s Canal. It’s an engaging little book, part route finder, part local history guide, that documents curiosities about the canal (plus its nearby canal links) as it runs between Paddington in London’s west end and Limehouse in the east end, where it meets the Thames.

Having cycled along the canal for the last few years on my commute to work, I was interested to read about the various curious objects that I pass every day. There’s just the right amount of information about each thing, and it really brings to life the history and utility of the lands immediately surrounding the canal.

The book is right up to date, incorporating the Olympic Park into its outline map, as well as new attractions on the route such as the Towpath Cafe in Kingsland. Its publication coincides with the 200th anniversary, this month, of the first cutting of the canal.

What really brings the book to life – and why the editors here at Mapping London are excited about it – is that every page has a lovely hand-sketched colour map showing the towpath along the canal and the surrounding scenery. The extract above shows the page where the canal passes along the western edge of Victoria Park in east London. The maps are both attractive to look at and clear to interpret. Locks, bridges and road links are are shown, with great attention to detail.

You can see more information about the book on the author’s website and buy it on Amazon.

Thanks to David Fathers and the publisher (Frances Lincoln Ltd) for sending a review copy.

Most government statistics are mapped according to official geographical units such as wards or lower super output areas. Whilst such units are essential for data analysis and making decisions about, for example, government spending, they are hard for many people to relate to and they don’t particularly stand out on a map. This is why we tried a new method back in July to show life expectancy statistics in a fresh light by mapping them on to London Tube stations. The resulting ”Lives on the Line” map has been our most successful yet with many people surprised at the extent of the variations in the data across London and also grateful for the way that it makes seemingly abstract statistics more easily accessible. To find out how we did it (and read some of the feedback) you can see here.

About the same time we were developing our map Mark Green, a PhD student from the University of Sheffield, had a similar idea to map levels of deprivation in London using an adaptation of Beck’s design. This map may be more familiar to people  than the geographically accurate version we used for Lives on the Line, and by using the size of the station circles you can see the extent to which levels of deprivation in London vary as you move along each line. Mark hasn’t managed to squeeze on any station labels so you may need to compare the map to the real thing to get a better idea of what’s going on. Mark’s map nicely illustrates some of the differences between inner and outer London (bigger circles are more deprived areas)  and also, to some extent, differences between east and west. To read more about the map see here (££).

Here is a small section of Mark’s map (we will bring you a fuller version as soon as we can):

You can obviously produce these sorts of maps for any data you want, so long as it has spatial information, but we think they are especially powerful for highlighting inequality in London and also raising the profile of many important government datasets that are now freely available.

Silky Map is a bespoke map of central London, printed on a soft cleaning cloth, the kind you would use for cleaning your iPhone screen or camera lens. As such, there’s a good chance you’ll be keeping it in your camera bag or wallet, and therefore it’s potentially a London map that you will always have handy.

Because of the material it’s printed on, if you scrunch up the map and then lay it out flat again, it doesn’t get creased, but returns to its mint condition. This is a much better result than the Crumpled Map which remained resolutely crumpled even when it was unravelled. The cloth has a map on both sides – one with the City area and an extract of Docklands, and the other showing the West End and an extract of Hampstead.

The cartography of the map is quite lively – it’s not the prettiest we’ve seen, but the medium of a cleaning cloth requires a map which is relatively simple and vivid in design. The map is designed with tourists in mind, with attractions pointed out, significant landmarks shown as silhouettes, and interesting and attractive streets and areas highlighted in yellow. The tube network is highlighted prominently. The map almost fully up to date – showing the Shard, although not the Circle Line extension to Hammersmith. There are a couple of mistakes – the DLR network dequence in the Docklands extract has a couple of stations out of order, and few of the other stations are a block away from where they actually are – but nothing too major.

You can find out more about Silky Map on the creator’s website.

Thanks to Gintare for sending us a Silky Map! Our computer monitors are now dust free!

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 Survey.

We really like the way the fonts have been carefully chosen to match the features on the map and the muted colour scheme. A lot of typographic maps lack detail (they often go for big blocky fonts covering fairly large areas) so it is nice to see so much included in these. The quality of the map is great and it comes crisply printed on semi-gloss paper ready for framing. At £24 (plus postage) I think they are amongst the best value “art” maps of London I have seen. Click here to find out more. 

This map is produced by The Green Traveller in collaboration with Visit England and the Green Tourism Business Scheme, and presents an idyllic view of London – where its parks are the most prominent features. Roads are shown as narrow lines, red London buses and Barclays Cycle Hire bikes adorn the streets, there is not a car or taxi (or white van) in sight. There’s even a (possibly relocated due to the Olympics) swan on the Serpentine. A welcome step away from the concrete and tarmac, cycle-baiting reality. The map’s pins highlight a number of commercial organisations (hotels, restaurants etc) with a green persuasion – the accompanying text for each details their eco-credentials.

You can download the map here.

The extract is from the map which contains Ordnance Survey data © Crown copyright and database right 2010. The map itself was produced in early 2011.