This decorative map, simply called “Kew”, was produced by Herry Perry of Vincent Brooks lithographers in 1929. It was part of a series of posters commissioned for what is now Transport for London and actually depicts the area to the south of modern-day Kew, running down to Surbiton. Like the rest in the series (Hounslow, Edgware, South Harrow and Morden), it highlights the end of a tube line – in this case, Kew Gardens and Richmond on the District line, and shows bus routes, indicated by roads with red borders, from the line end to parks and pubs, golf courses and historic buildings, encouraging visitors to make use of the tube/bus combination to visit a new area. Of particular note, the Kew map covers an area which has not really changed much in the intervening 90 years – Bush(e)y Park, Richmond Park and the Royal Gardens (now Kew Gardens) still dominate the area, and little of the green space shown has since developed into housing. It might be possible to use this map for a modern day visit to the area – but keep your smartphone handy just in case. There is lots of lovely detail on this map, such as the trees drawn in the parks, the odd bus going along the marked routes, and various figures shown playing sports or taking photos. Short snippets of text add further information about some locations on the map, and the pubs are not only named but often have their signboard drawn on the map too. The scale bar and direction arrow is also a thing of beauty. It is shown as a a special TfL “roundel”: Note that the map completely omits drawing the railway line which connects Mortlake and Richmond to Twickenham, Teddington, Kingston...

This stylised map of central London was created by MUTI, a South African design studio, and is “as seen in Mary Poppins Returns”, a film which was out in cinemas earlier this year. It was commissioned by High Life (the British Airways inflight magazine). It’s a nice bit of artistic cartography, with two obvious landmarks (Buckingham Palace and Tower Bridge) located in approximately the right place with respect to the all-important River Thames and each other. The blush pink, turquoise, violet and amber colour palette is also very attractive. Discovered on Dribbble. ©...

The Prudential RideLondon weekend takes place this year on August 3-4. One of the events is Freecycle, when some of central London’s biggest roads are closed to motor traffic, and anyone with a bike can enjoy seven miles of wide roads with just thousands of other cyclists for company (it can get very busy so, unlike the other RideLondon events that weekend, this is not one for the fast cyclist). The event organisers have produced this map, showing the route and surrounding streets, along with “lead in” routes along nearby cycle “superhighway” routes – after all, you need to get your bike to the circuit in the first place. It’s a nice bit of clean, crisp cartography which shows not just the route but also various hubs where other activities are taking place. Food points and music bands are also marked. Riders can join and leave at any point. See the official web page for more information about the event, including high-resolution version of the map. From the event...

We featured a map showing London’s North Bank earlier in the summer – just in time for the peak holiday season, the rivals across the Thames now have a new map of their own! “South of the River” (larger version here, or download a PDF here) aims to map everything of tourist and local interest between Vauxhall Bridge and Tower Bridge. The fold-out guide helps the visitor navigate along the South Bank and understand how it, and the nearby Vauxhall, Waterloo, Bankside and London Bridge neighbourhoods all fit together (the business promoters for all five areas have collaborated for the project). With a copy of the map, you can start at, for example, Vauxhall City Farm, and then navigate to Gabriel’s Wharf for lunch, stroll past City Hall, and end up at the White Cube in Bermondsey. A couple of specific trails are included – the Thames Path is shown by black dots, while a blue line shows the new Low Line, which weaves in and out of the railway arches that are a defining feature of, but no longer a barrier to, the area. Train and tube stations are marked, along with river boat piers and public toilets. Attractions are generally shown with little sketches. On the other side of the map, each of the five districts has a pen portrait. It’s a really nice piece of local-area mapping, creating an attractive piece that invites the holder to explore (N.B. smaller roads and most paths are not included for clarity, so you might still need Google Maps for the fine detail). The distinctive and pleasant colour scheme is bright without being overpowering. There is a “mini-map” for getting to the area from the other side of the river, which conveniently has the District/Circle...

This map, dating from 1875, appears on the back of a “Guinea season ticket” for entry to Alexandra Palace, in north London. The palace was recently restored and public entrance is now available to some areas for free. It’s a nice, vintage map, and the use of colour is interesting and attractive, with key parks coloured in and named, and the River Thames drawn with blue lines along the direction of flow. The map is finished with a gold decorative border. It does suffer a little from overlapping of names and lines in places (e.g. around Bank). It shows not only line names (and colours) but also major road names. Angel is referred to by the “Angel Inn” (the tube station hadn’t yet been built – this is pre deep-tube) and interestingly the main line King’s Cross station was called Great Northern station – but the tube station nearby is called King’s Cross. At the front is a grand drawing of Alexandra Palace itself, mc=uch as it looks today, but with the addition of a hot air balloonist above. It states the view is from “Muswell Hill” which is curious. At first glance, looking at Alexandra Palace from the opposite direction appears to line up, while the “back” of the current palace, which faces Muswell Hill, is without the promenade or much of the park, and spoilt by a car park. However, perhaps 140+ years ago it was indeed more symmetrical. However, the current range of rail options to the palace are much reduced – the Finsbury Park – Highgate – Alexandra Palace Station line is closed (and is now the Parkland Walk) while the Stamford Hill to Wood Green link never got built (although it might appear as part of Crossrail 2 in...

The public may not be able to visit Tottenham Court Road station’s Crossrail concourse or platforms yet, thanks to the well-publicised delay across the wider project, but the station was one of the most complete in the central section, a year ago, and so it was possible to visit the station as part of Construction Open Doors, shortly before the news of the big delay came out. Visitors were let into the new Dean Street ticket hall (approximately half way between Oxford Circus and Tottenham Court Road’s existing ticket hall), down to the platforms and along to the far end. One nice surprise is this concept artwork appearing on the walls in three different places, and in three different colours. It is in fact, a heavily abstracted map of the local area. Built up areas are represented by the circles, with the spaces in them being roads. Small TfL roundels denote underground stations, while a simple house symbol in the middle of a square space is a nod to the Soho Square “cottage” ventilation shaft. The white-on-black version appears in the Dean Street ticket hall, while the grey-on-white version is down at platform level. At the other end, just the other side of the existing Tottenham Court Road station, the circulation area has a red version of the map – the stronger colour here reflecting the vibrancy of the area as Soho merges into Theatreland: In the red map above, split across at least four smoked glass panels, a single roundel sits in the middle of a long, horizontal street – Oxford Street. Regent Street crosses here from top to bottom. Further to the right is Soho Square with its “house”, and just to the right and up a bit is the roundel for...

The weather’s lovely at the moment – the last thing you want to do is spend that time deep down in the bowels on London, on the deep tube network, surely? Or maybe at least, how about alighting one stop early and walking the last bit? But how long would that take? Back in 2017 we featured a special tube map produced by Transport for London, that featured numbers along each segment in the network – the estimated travel time in minutes if you walked between each station. Sometimes, it’s faster, and sometimes, it’s healthier, to walk a route you would normally take the tube along. The map only included tube lines, and only in Zones 1-2. Beyond that distances between stations tend to be longer, and the network is less crowded, so the benefits and likelihood of people switching to walking would be reduced More recently, TfL has, however, extended the map. It now goes to the edge of Zone 3, and crucially includes the inner city National Rail network (i.e. non-TfL) too. These means suddenly large parts of south London’s complex suburban network now appear, with walking indications. The extension means the Victoria line is fully covered – TfL estimate that it would take the average person to walk 5 hours and 3 minutes. Some of these measurements still look suspect – 9 minutes from Warren Street to Euston seems generous, as it’s only two blocks along and one up the Fitzrovia grid system. The shortest time on the network is 2 minutes from Canary Wharf to Heron Quays – you can definitely see one platform from the other – followed by 4 minutes from Mansion House to Cannon Street – in fact if you run this particular leg, you can beat...

This map, “Hooking Up”, was produced by the Evening Standard newspaper as part of their Future London project, in association with Source London, a service provider/lobbyist of charging points in London, and Zap-Map, who hold a comprehensive database of the locations of these facilities. The map can be seen in an Evening Standard article detailing how each borough is expanding its public electric charge point network – a critical piece of infrastructure needed for a cleaner, more efficient future where London’s motor vehicles will be electrically powered. While the map is a bit naughty in its colour scheme, using various different hues to represent a linear scale (number of charge points in each borough), can also see the key metric simply from the size of the circle representing each borough. The different hues, combined with translucency, also allow the circles to overlap slightly without much loss of visual impact of each circle, allowing the boroughs to remain in the approximately correct geographical location while allowing the big facility boroughs (Westminster, Hounslow, Hammersmith & Fulham, Wandsworth and Greenwich) to rightly dominate the map. The slightly overlapping circles also look a little like a cartoon exhaust cloud, which may have been a deliberate idea. The map is finished off with a really clever touch – the all-important River Thames is shown as a charging cable. The map was drawn by Adrian Black, a graphic designer who regularly contributes to the Evening Standard. Found online. © Adrian Black/Evening...

You know about London’s South Bank – the other side of the river has been looking on at envy at the pedestrian utopia over there and has created this guide and walking map to the “Northbank” – the area stretching from Trafalgar Square to Aldwych. The map has been drawn by Olivia Brotheridge and was commissioned by Northbank BID (Business Improvement District). It’s great to see so much detail in a map like this – it doesn’t overwhelm, but the full street and alley network is included, along with the many landmarks that crowd the streets in this very central part of the capital. The slightly pastel yellows, blues and greens that dominate the map give it a nice uniformity in design. A number of font styles help provide navigational and feature order, from small alleyways to major streets and key building names. With the junction of Strand and Waterloo Bridge being one of London’s pollution hotspots, and with tens of thousands of cyclists, pedestrians, bus-users and taxis passing the junction every day, a focus of the map is on encouraging walking routes – given the intensity of this area, this focus is understandable and encouraging. You can find out more about the map and their initiative to encourage walking and reduce pollution in this area, on the Northbank BID website. – you can also download a PDF copy of the map with an accompanying guide. Some local businesses in the area may also have paper copies available (and if you are a local business here you can order your own.) Spotted in the Covent Gardner...

This artistic map of a green walking route in central London has been created by graphic designer Helen Ilus. By showing just the parks that are the focus of the walk, and not the rest of London’s hustle and bustle, it is an effective and attractive way of highlighting the walk. The walk goes from St James’ Park and its Duck Island Cottage, to the viewpoint back across the centre of the capital, on Primrose Hill. By combining this kind of thematic map with Google Maps or a regular street map, the walker has all they need for a pleasant, urban day out. For those for whom seven miles is a little short, this 24 mile extravaganza – The Grand Green Tour, is a big loop around many inner London parks, both north and south of the River Thames. You will, for sure, be tired after 12 hours of pounding the pavements, so it’s a good one for a cycle, or for splitting into a several legs. A third graphic from Helen, “Wild Weekend”, looks further out from central London, framing two walks in outer London – the North walk being focused around Hampstead, Finsbury Park and the Lea Valley, the South walk going from Barnes to Richmond and Bushy Park, with a suggestion that each walk will comfortably fill a day: Mapping London really likes the strong design elements of these maps – greens and blues, and plenty of white space to present a decluttered look. You might know some or all of these parks already, if you live in London – but did you know you can link them together efficiently in this way? Created By Helen Ilus. Images from the illustrator’s Twitter...

The Painted Hall at the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich reopens this weekend after a two-year renovation and restoration. At the entrance to the new visitor centre in the old undercroft underneath the hall, sits this backlit copy of a historic map-style engraving of the Maritime Greenwich complex. In the middle are the two key buildings in the Old Royal Naval College, each with their own cupolas – the Chapel on the left and the Painted Hall on the right. Behind, is Queen’s Anne’s House, now part of the National Maritime Museum complex. On the hill, slightly to the right and sitting on (and defining) Longitude = 0°, is the Royal Observatory. The modern day view is surprisingly similar, the main addition being an unpleasant and busy road running between the college and the house. Only in the periphery to the left and the right, has the modern city developed. The engraving is from the 18th century and is entitled “The prospect of the Royal Hospital at Greenwich on the River Thames”. Its was drawn by Colen Campbell”. It can be purchased in the shop underneath the Painted Hall or at Royal Museums Greenwich. A slightly later version, with an addition of a statue in the courtyard, is in the Wellcome Collection. View from inside the cupola on the right – viewed from the vestibule of the Painted Hall. With thanks to the Old Royal Naval College for a preview visit to the restored Painted...

The John Snow Cholera Map is world famous as the map that identified the cause of the disease, and was one of the first epidemiological maps created. However, a number of other maps of the location of individuals with the disease were produced at around the same time, in an attempt to try and determine spatial patterns and possible causes. The Wellcome Trust‘s collection contains many of these maps and various graphs and other data visualisations of the disease’s spread. Various theories were tested, from postulating the airborne spread of a “mist” of the disease, to looking at the location with respect to the sewer network, underground geology, or simply height above sea level. We show excerpts of three such maps here, all good examples of data mapping in London in the 1800s. Above (source) is a map of an outbreak in London’s east end in 1866, with dots showing each victim. Red lines show the sewer network and areal colours correspond to different rock types. Blue lines show water supply catchment areas and the outbreak source is circled in red. The dot data was likely rolled onto an existing topology/geology map of London rather than the full map being drawn specifically for this purpose. Aside from the morbid nature of the subject, it’s a rather attractively draw and crisp map of London’s extent and major natural features and networks, in the mid-1800s. Below (source) is a variant of the “famous” John Snow map produced in 1854, showing deaths by household, each as a black bar moving away from the street entrance to each house. Also shown is a shaded area indicating a disused burial pit suspected as a possible source, along with the pump that famously was the actual source vector for this...

From conference facility organisers PowWowNow comes this map/infographic showing the worst tube stations in central London for stress. They’ve produced a simple index of tube station stress by combining minutes of station-specific delays for tube trains, with the total numbers of people entering/exiting the station, and counting negative/mixed social media (mainly Twitter) posts. All three measures were counted across a full year and then combined to produce a stress index. The 15 highest scoring stations are mapped here. Acton Town (not on the map) actually scores worst in terms of tube train delay minutes, but this is more than mitigated by relatively fewer people using it (and tweeting negatively about it) so it doesn’t make the top 15. Stratford and Canary Wharf are the two non-Zone 1 stations that do. I’m a little surprised to see that Canada Water didn’t make it into the list, the interchange from there is the source of a lot of pain as it simply can’t deal with the numbers of people switching from the Overground to the Jubilee line, during the rush hour. The data comes from TfL Open Data (for the user counts), a TfL FOI request (for the delays) and use of a commercial sentiment analyser. The subtext to the map is presumably PowWowNow suggesting that maybe skipping the tube and staying at home or working in a different location would be a good idea. True – avoiding the centre of town in general is always a smart move for a stress-free journey. From a cartographical perspective, we rather like the use of the tube stations with faces at various levels of stress, and the yellow/red colour ramp – it starts “pretty bad” and only gets worse! (N.B. there are 16 faces on this top 15...

This lovely schematic diagram was first created in 1939 by George Dow. It shows the three LNER (London and North Eastern Railway) north London networks – radiating out from the Marylebone, King’s Cross, and Liverpool Street/Fenchurch Street London terminii, in a single map. Unusually, the map includes a series of pictograms, illustrating nearby facilities, leisure and tourist activities to each station. Dr Maxwell Roberts (of Tube Map Central) has recreated this map digitally, using a replica font, icons specially created by Doug Rose. It means we have a full digital vector representation of an 80-year-old map, allowing for reprints of the work at extremely high qualities and resolutions. He has also improved on the cartography of the original, making it a strict octolinear map (that is, straight lines meeting at right angles and 45 degrees only) like the more famous Tube map – the original had bent quite a few lines subtly to fit the detail in. The network itself has remained surprisingly intact over the last 80 years, with most of the lines still serving commuters daily. The most notable closures are the Buntingford line, and the Muswell Hill and Palace Gates branches near Wood Green. Several others have converted into London Underground lines – you can see parts of the modern Metropolitan, Northern and Central lines, and the DLR. There aren’t many Greyhound Racing, Speedway Racing or Ice Hockey facilities left, though. An obvious extension would be to adapt the map to reflect the modern north London suburban commuter rail network layout, and the change in facilities and attractions, while retaining the vintage look of the map. You can explore many other original maps of London’s transit networks, at Tube Map Central....

This attractive map of the housing and infrastructure history of Walthamstow and Leyton in north-east London has been created by Scott Davies. Scott used QGIS and OpenStreetMap data to create an attractive, vintage-style basemap and then shaded residential areas with different colours indicating when each block was developed. Older areas are shown in blues, while the shaded colour becomes yellower to show newer developments. CDRC Maps has mapped larger building blocks in a similar way from Valuation Office Agency data, however the resolution of the VOA data is quite low. This manually compiled map shows much more detail, including individual buildings in some areas. Scott used old Ordnance Survey maps, amongst other sources, to determine the antiquity of buildings – so once-isolated dwellings are discretely shown on the map even as more recent developments have surrounded them with newer housing. Dates written in red show the development of other major features in the area, such as the various reservoirs in Walthamstow Wetlands, the railways and Victoria Line, major roads, parks and cemeteries. The map is finished with an attractive set of adornments, including a lovely old-style title, compass rose, scale, overview map as an inset, and key. Scott used Inkscape to provide the artistic and cartographic finishing touches and elevate the work from a simple datamap to a work of art. The overall piece is a lovely bit of digital cartography that shows effectively and attractively the residential history of this London suburb. You can see Scott’s map on this tweet which links to a PDF of the map. Detail from “A Chronological Map of Walthamstow”, around the Wood Street/Forest Road...

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...

The HERE Urban Mobility Index profiles 30 cities around the world, looking at how connected, sustainable, affordable and innovative they are, relating to urban mobility – the options that people have to move around the city area. London is one of the cities and scores first place for its public transport efficiency and low emission zone coverage, however its score is pushed down by its poor traffic flow (which is no surprise as it correlates inversely with public transport efficiency) and relatively expensive public transport fares (with respect to monthly incomes of its residents). As part of the dissemination of the urban mobility index results, HERE have produced a set of maps – the map at the top is a “placesetting” map for each city, showing the full public road network (with nice CSS colouring/animation), and the bottom map is a data map, showing the numbers of public transport vehicles (buses, trains, trams, metro) stopping at each stop or station throughout the city, on a typical weekday. There are several other data maps also included in the profile for each city, including coverage of mobility options regardless of frequency (London again scores well due to its dense network of bus-stops in particular), and areas of green space and low-emissions zones. The maps are good, cleanly presented maps of the pertinent data, they are a visually effective way of summarising London’s mobility, and allow an easy comparison with the 30+ other cities in the index. Explore the HERE Urban Mobility Index for London (and other...

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...

The Little Globe Company is Loraine Rutt, a London-based cartographer and artist who specialises in maps created from clay, perhaps most famously crafting and hand-painting miniature porcelain globes in painstakingly precise detail. Her output is not just globe-based though, as this piece, showing London’s relief (hills and valleys) as well as its river network, both above and below ground (many of London’s smaller rivers are now hidden, often called the “lost rivers”. The relief is shown as stepped contours, allowing steeper gradients to stand out, and looks great particularly when viewed with a lightsource at an angle (simulating the sun) as can be seen below. The contours of Muswell Hill, in the northern part of the map, particularly stand out – any London cyclist will know them well. Newham in the east looks spectacularly flat, as does Heathrow Airport in the far west (as you would expect). As with the ceramic globes, the London’s Rivers piece has great attention to detail – the artist’s formal cartographic background ensuring that each work is geographically correct as well as looking fantastic. The artist has produced just 10 of these pieces. You’ll be able to see one of them at The Arches Studios at Peckham, at their Christmas open studio event this weekend (only). Thank you to Loraine Rutt for demonstrating her expertise at a special event, and The Map House for hosting her and an exhibition of her works. Photos © The Little Globe Co and from the website and Instragram...

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...

The Greater London Authority has published a data map, showing the locations within London where tree canopies can be seen from overhead. There are about as many trees as people in London, and 21% of the capital’s land area is covered by them. This is an impressive number – this must make London one of the greenest large areas in England. Some of the home countries have perhaps 25%+ tree coverage, but most other “rural” areas are dominated by farmland or moorland, rather than forest. You can see the map at https://maps.london.gov.uk/canopy-cover/. The data and methodology has also been published. The data was automatically detected from aerial imagery by machine learning. I do have my concerns about it – for example, this area to the left of the curved of the railway line is shown as forest on the map, but actually it is a grassy field: In some residential terraced areas, the back gardens also tend to be entirely full of tree canopies, which seems a little surprising – even if a single tree’s canopy will cover much of a typical small inner London garden, I can’t believe it would cover all of it. So it’s a good first analysis of London’s tree cover, but does need some refining. The main data source is imagery in various wavelengths from the SENTINEL satellite. An obvious additional datasource for refinement would be LIDAR (which is released as open data by the Environment Agency, often at sub-metre horizontal resolution), which can accurately detect height changes. Trees tend to have a characteristic canopy shape and variation (i.e. they are not completely flat) and also comparing LIDAR DTM and DEM heights should show, for example, a green field where the grass is 1 metre tall, is not a...

In celebration of the Christmas lights being switched on in Covent Garden this evening, we feature this lovely map of the precinct, which has been drawn by artist Adam Dant, for The Covent Gardener, a periodical that focuses on the landmarks, shops and residents and characters of London’s famous and bustling shopping and tourism heart, Covent Garden. The work appears in his recently published compendium, Maps of London & Beyond. The first version of the map appeared in a 2015 issue of the publication, and since then, Adam Dant has gradually added characters to the map, issue by issue. In the book, Adam writes that he was inspired by the time when breakfast cereals contained a random plastic figurine in each box, allowing the gradual build up of a collection like this. If you have ever visited Covent Garden, you will be familiar with at least some of the current-day characters represented – which coexist on the map with those from 300 or so years of history of the market. For example, the “dog man” (34) or the “Yoda” street performers (12), on the section leading from Covent Garden tube station to the central market building. Spot also the Moomins (22) who have a tiny shop inside the historic market building. The presence of the person dressed as a giant apple (14) marks the “Apple Festival” which is held in autumn each year to highlight and promote the UK’s apple harvesting season, she coincidently is located outside the building of the modern Apple Store: The map is distictively an Adam Dant work, with the soft watercolour brushstrokes, distinctive colour palette (dark greens predominate here) and intricate detailing of landmarks and people. The adjacent page reproduces the 52 characters in a line-up and provides detail...

Readers of Mapping London, and Londoners in general, will be very familiar with the striking straight lines of the Tube Map. But you probably won’t have seen this map before, which employs the same kind of schematisation to show London’s now completely vanished tram and trolleybus network (there is a tram in south London now, but it wasn’t around when this map was created). The map, while simplifying the corresponding road network to 45-degree angles – just like the tube map – includes many other details, such as tube stations, parks (with names), towns and suburbs. The River Thames is there of course, and is also subjected to the 45-degree rule. Road bridges across the river are shown and named, regardless of whether a tram or trolleybus crossed them. Some angles don’t work too well – Seven Sisters road for example, is shown as an extremely wiggly road here, whereas in actual life it’s very nearly a straight line – just one that travels at around 60 degrees from north, rather than multiples of 45. Because it inevitably connects with further trolleybus and tram routes along its length, the map has to stay fairly true to real-life. Hence the dizzying wiggles: As this map shows, lovely as it is, the simplicity of the tube map doesn’t translate very well to London’s complex road network. So perhaps this is why the idea almost didn’t survive for above-ground networks, and London’s more modern bus maps (now discontinued) have always used the actual geographical network. However, there is one modern successor map – the central London bus map for tourists (see the third example on this post). Another oddity is that the map is quite “purist” in terms of colour. It doesn’t colour-code the lines – they...

Air pollution has long been a problem in London, and the current mayor has identified pollution as one of his major goals to highlight and tackle polluion, and improve the capital’s air quality during his time in charge. This map, of the modelled 2020 annual pollution levels of NO2, has been produced by Parallel, using the London Atmospheric Emissions Inventory 2013 (LAEI) dataset that was published by the Greater London Authority in 2016 (they have since published a slightly updated version). The calculated data is presented as a raster (a grid of estimated pollution values) and Parallel have taken this and made it into an 3D webmap, so that you can “fly around” the map and see towers of pollution – and troughs of fresh, clean air: There’s something quite compelling this kind of presentation – it works well because this kind of pollution is dominated by, and generally restricted to, major roads. The 3D spikes therefore don’t obscure the rest of the map, as they are generally constrained to quite linear features. They act to both emphasise the significant and scary nature of pollution in some areas, and illustrate that, by walking or cycling through back streets rather than on main roads, your pollution intake can be significantly lowered. One striking element, on examining the map, is where elevated sections of road, such as the Hammersmith Flyover, the Westway and the bridges across the Thames, are pollution hotspots – the height meaning that the surrounding environment is further away and so can less effectively absorb the pollution: It’s not just cars, of course – some pollution shows along railway lines frequented diesel trains, while Heathrow Airport (see bottom image) also stands out – particularly the two runways, and specifically the points where aeroplanes...

Urban Rambles is a new book by Nicholas Rudd-Jones, featuring walks through many of England’s cities. The book comes with a 22 route maps, drawn by illustrator Sara Mulvanny (see her portfolio page for the book), including a couple in London, which we feature here. Above is the “London Inner Circle” which stretches from Hyde Park to the Olympic Park, and makes good use of the Regent’s Canal, Thames Path and the Royal Parks, to avoid road-walking in the centre of the capital whereever possible and form a complete loop. Having walked, cycled and even boated recently along the Regent’s Canal, I can confirm that it is a lovely route. Below is another London map in the book, Olympic Park to Tower Hill, which focuses on the eastern end of the above walk, the enlarged scale meaning that more cartouches and other cartographic niceties appear. The colour palette used for the maps is very pleasant – it reminds me a little of the Stamen Watercolour map, but, being hand-drawn, the textures are used discerningly, and don’t distract from the waypoint or route detail. Key landmarks are sketched, with dotted lines connecting them to their actual locations on the map. A number of other cartographic details, such as stars showing particularly scenic locations, trees showing the key green areas, and an attractive compass rose, finish off the map. Urban Rambles is available on Amazon or in all good...

Layers of London, which has just launched, aims to be a platform for geolocating and documenting the local history of the capital. It works by allowing historical facts, comments and memories to be attached to pins on a map. The pins are grouped together as projects, or collections. The map itself can be adjusted, from a standard basemap, to various historical maps of London, including the high-resolution Victorian Ordnance Survey maps of the capital that were scanned by the National Library of Scotland. An ongoing project is also stitching together and orthorectifying (georeferencing) aerial photographs taken by the RAF after the Second World War. This effort, being carried out by school pupils in a number of London schools, is gradually working across London from the east. It’s a great idea, and the project, financed by the National Lottery Heritage Fund and a number of other match funders, has a big team on board to manage the project’s utilisation and evolution. The focus so far has been on building out a modern platform and it has only just started acquiring content, so the map is a little sparse in places. We hope that it is able to link up with a number of other projects that georeference old maps and images of London and allow user-generated historical content – such as Wikimapia, the LSE’s Booth Poverty map and accompanying historical notebooks, Mapping for Change,...

You’ve done the Circle Line Pub Crawl. Now try the Circle Line Food Crawl. Or use this special “Food Tube Map”, produced by Wren Kitchens (they write about it here), to visit unusual gastronomic experiences anywhere inside the Zone 1 area marked out by the Circle Line. The 25 restaurants and eateries included in this graphic are all known for doing something a little bit unusual with their food – from vegan burgers to ice cream nachos. The map is based on the well-known tube map, focusing on central London. Note that it doesn’t quite include the whole Zone 1 network – the (yellow) Circle Line is substituted by the (pink) Hammersmith & City line, along the northern side of the network. As Wren Kitchens say: Over the last year, we’ve seen eateries pushing the boundaries and adding innovative new twists to classic dishes and drinks – particularly in London. From Fried Horlicks Ice Cream to Matcha Freakshakes; the capital currently boasts an extensive array of eccentric food/drink trends and experiences – that are proving to be a BIG hit with foodie’s, avid Instagrammers, and those that are simply just curious (and want to understand what all the fuss is about!). It’s clear that there’s an appetite for such products, with many travelling far and wide to give these exciting delicacies a try – therefore, Wren Kitchens have created a fun new visual that maps out exactly where you can find the latest food crazes across Central London, in order to help you plan your route. Anyway, plenty to try if you want something a bit different from your meat and two vegetables this evening. Thanks to Wren Kitchens for the map and...

TfL is keen to get people travelling on the tube when it’s not so busy, and also beyond Zone 1. With this in mind, they’ve commissioned these line maps, in conjunction with Time Out magazine. Each line (except the Waterloo and City) gets one, with the most interesting sections of each line converted into a “wiggle” map, surrounded by various tube-accessible tourist attractions. There’s one for the London Overground too, although it doesn’t help unravel what connects to what on the line – mind you, the official London Overground map is a bit of a headache too. You can see all the maps on this TfL Flickr page. Each poster is coloured by its line, and generally includes the type of tube train that runs on that line, drawn somewhere on the map amongst the tourist attractions – a nice touch. There’s a lot of artistic licence applied to the drawings – for example, the dinosaurs above are serious sexed up compared to their concrete versions that do however indeed appear in Crystal Palace park. You should still go and see them though, if you never have! The line maps tend to not show stations that don’t have anything particularly interesting near them, and the outer ends of the longer lines are also generally missed out. However, the Victoria line (see below) has its full length shown, with things to do at every tube stop. I always knew the Victoria line was the best. The campaign launches officially on Friday so expect to see these posters appearing at various tube stations and in Time Out. Thanks to Diamond Geezer for the...

Tired of London? Samuel Johnson said you are then tired of life. But sometimes, there are attractions in living outside the capital, while continuing to work in the centre. Such as a nice big garden, and being away from the “urban heat island” that makes London hotter than the surrounding regions. To do that, you need to pick a good commuter town, and this tool, from TotallyMoney (who also produced a London house price/sqft map we featured a while back), aims to help you find that. It’s been freshly updated with 2018 data. Basically, there are four attributes – min/max travel time to a London terminus, season ticket cost, life satisfaction score (between 7 and 8 – ask people how happy they are with life, out of 10, they will generally say 7 or 8 on average) and house prices. The tool adds these values together, and ranks each of 115 towns. You can set min/max filters on each of the attributes, and the tool will then reorder the rank of towns that have values falling within your filters. A green/blue colour ramp is used to highlight the better places. Looking at all 115-odd places, Purfleet in Essex is No. 1. Cheap, quick commute in, happy people and good value (relatively speaking) house prices. The results are arranged on a pseudo-map of how the towns link to London via the rail network. It’s not quite right – it’s missing Cambridge to Liverpool Street, and Bedford to Luton for example, and is also missing a few towns, e.g. Marlow. Hertford and Ware are not connected to London correctly, and Cheshunt is also wrong. So don’t use it for journey planning, but it might give you some ideas on places, for sure. To see the actual...

London’s been sweltering under a heatwave for the last couple of weeks. Mapping London co-creator Dr James Cheshire has created this map from the latest (29 JUne) Landsat 8 thermal imagery of the capital. ExCeL is a particular hotspot – its large, flat, metallic roof was showing a temperature of 38°C, having been baked by the sun. The map uses a striking thermal colour ramp – ranging from hot to super-hot. Dr Cheshire’s advice – head to the parks to stay cool. Copyright Spatial Analysis/James...

This is a map of Hackney Borough, from the perspective of its old, wealthy houses, and the discovered and undiscovered treasures buried under them, from the days when Hackney was full of country estates, before the ready sources of water led to a boom in industry. It was drawn by Adam Dant, and is one of the maps featured in his book “Maps of London & Beyond” which was published last month and we reviewed. The map is also available as a fine art print from TAG Fine Arts. We really like the green and yellow colour palette – Hackney is a bustling, inner city borough, but this is a reminder of its more rural times, and its many parks that remain. The use of Kingsland Road as the defining geographical feature, showing it as the widest road, and a straight line (both which are true in real life too), is striking, particularly as it’s shown with a slant, rather than just being part of a grid. The little building sketches, complete with signpost style captions, also act to enhance the map, as do the individual house details. Other inscriptions reveal the heritage behind modern features of the borough. For example, London Fields was once known as Cat & Mutton Fields – a pub nearby retains the old name. Morning Lane was once known as Money Lane. I’m not sure of the reason behind the dinosaur on Hackney Marsh though… There is an exhibition showing large format versions of some of the maps in the book, and other works, at The Map House in Knightsbridge, running until 14 July. The Map House is just around the corner from Harrods and is open during normal working hours. The shop and gallery is worth an extended...

A lot of Londoners are currently focused on the World Cup in Russia at the moment, so Mapping London is taking a look eastwards, thanks to the latest boutique map created by productive cartographers Blue Crow Media. The map is essentially a Moscow version of their London Underground Architecture & Design Map and features the same basic concept of taking a complex metro network, mapping it geographically, and then including, on the reverse, a detailed guide to the most architecturally impressive parts of the underground system, complete with photos and descriptions. The map and guide are bilingual, in England and Russian. The central Moscow area has an inset map, where the metro is shown in the context of the street network. The map data comes from OpenStreetMap. The map is finished in a card wallet, with an “M” cut out of the front, allowing a sneak peak of the cartography within. Londoners are very proud of the London Underground’s efficiency (most of the time) and history, but are perhaps willing to accept that the Moscow Metro is even more ornate than their own, and this guide nicely encapsulates the opulence of Moscow’s mass transit. It is available from Blue Crow Media’s online store. Thanks to Blue Crow Media for the review...

Adam Dant has, for a long time, been sketching lovely maps of London history, culture and phenomena, often focusing in particular on the historic East End. Now, Batsford, an imprint of Pavilion Books, has produced this book, collating Dant’s existing wonderful maps (and debuting some new ones) in single place and adding background information. The book has been created in partnership with Spitalfields Life, a long-running local blog for the area, and is published today. The book is impressively large, each individual page being landscape A3 size. This format gives each map the space it needs on a single page, to allow the detail, often including hand-written annotations and depictions of individual people, houses, cartouches and other embellishments, to come out clearly. The paper is also uncoated, giving a slightly rough, traditional map feel. The overall production quality and presentation is excellent – always critical for a book containing so many graphic works – congratulations to Batsford for taking such care with the production, giving the maps the justice they deserve. There are nearly 50 maps in all, many of whom have only previously been available as fine art works. A lovely graphical contents page (actually run-in across several pages) provides a glimpse of each map, through a circle, for those wanting to pick and choose rather than read from cover to cover. The title hints that it’s not just London that has been drawn by Dant, and indeed near the end locations as diverse as Paris, Rome, Scotland’s Great Glen and Tunbridge Wells get the cartographic treatment too. But first and foremost this is a book capturing London. Themes stretch from slang to Shakespeare, riots to coffee houses and Hackney to Mayfair. Who knew there were so many wrecks in the Thames estuary,...

The Tube Map is a design classic – the straight lines, even spacing and lack of unnecessary above-ground detail has become a hall-mark of metro maps across the world, since it was first drawn by H.C. Beck in the 1930s. Today, the printed versions of London’s tube map include a specific acknowledgement of the creator of the concept, even as the map itself has greatly expanded with the addition of a many new services. However, there was a period of time, between the merging together of various rival networks in central London at the beginning of the 20th century, and the creation of the Beck tube map, when cartographers attempted to show the crowded and complex network in different, but geographically-focused, ways. This map, by E.G. Perman, and available in the David Rumsey Map Collection, was one of the last maps produced, of London’s tube network, before the Beck “revolution” of the 1930s. It was drawn in 1927 and issued the following year, and shows some network simplifications – the lines between stations are shown with simple, gentle curves, rather than capturing the actual wiggles of the network. Stations are shown as small filled diamonds for regular stations, and larger, hollow diamonds for larger ones – when these are overlaid, due to the different colours of the different lines, there is some indication of the connection. Interestingly, and surprisingly, the complex crossovers of the Northern Line, just south of Camden Town, are shown on the map. Connections with mainline rail are shown beside the relevant station with small curly lines, with the operator name written just below them in a smaller text. This being a 1920s map, the classic “flowery” touches are present, such as the sweeping serifs of the font, waves on the...

[Updated with additional technical detail – see below] Here’s a fascinating data map of ground deformation (subsidence, upswelling) in central London, based on data from 2011-2017 and recalibrated to show the average annual change – be it rising (blue = 2mm/year upwards) or sinking (red = 2mm/year downwards). The data was obtained from 150 remote sensing images captured by the TerraSAR-X satellite and other InSAR (Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar) sources. It was processed using at TRE ALTAMIRA in Milan, Italy, using a technique called Permanent Scatterer Interferometry. All sorts of interesting patterns appear from the map. The most obvious is the red line running across the middle – the Crossrail tunnels across central London. The project has likely resulted in the slight drop in levels seen, although extensive compensation grouting has aimed to minimise the changes. Other red lines show electrical ducting projects and other utilities/infrastructure projects. Conversely, a large blue area near the south edge of the map might be early premptive groundwork on the Northern line Underground extension to Battersea Power Station, and the extensive residential works at Battersea Power Station (which is right at river/sea level) and the Vauxhall area in general. The specific reason however is not known. The large red area to the east could be two projects – various residential and other construction around the O2 Arena in North Greenwich, and the various works on the north bank opposite – London City Island, Limmo Peninsula shaft for Crossrail tunnelling works, and general residential tower development at Canning Town. This area has the River Lea running through it with dramatic meanders. The dewatering of deep chalk aquifer here, necessary to stabilise the ground, has seen a significant drop. Also, crucially, there were no buildings here before, so ground level...

What do you do when you are a boutique retailer, with two showrooms that are both small and are a ten minute walk away from each other, with some interesting but confusing streets in between? If you are in a rush you just screenshot a Google Maps route and stick it on your website, so it’s refreshing to see deVOL, an upmarket kitchen retailer, has taken a different approach and has drawn and published a leaflet containing this map of their Clerkenwell neighbourhood, showing not only a route between the two showrooms, but also a selection of interesting things to visit in the local area. The map was drawn by Assistant Graphic Designer Mol Mathews, and a blog post on the deVOL website details the brief and the process. The map has a nice mix of hand-annotated places and regularly labelled streets, with four pastel shades added sparingly to give a bit of colour to the map, and the all-important route highlighted in red. The map is firmly grounded in realism, with pubs, dogs, pigeons and brollies showcasing the reality of London. 16 points are numbered, with an accompanying key detailing these “favourite spots”. In all, it’s a lovely homage to a lovely inner London neighbourhood. It’s a work of care and attention. You can pick up a free copy in either of their showrooms. Obtained from a deVOL showroom after Mapping London spotted a...

Mapping London has long enjoyed Stephen Walter’s fabulously detailed, painstakingly created pencil-sketch maps of London, and now one of his most famous works, The Island, has been made into a jigsaw puzzle. It was launched late last year by publishers Prestel UK and comes as a 400-piece work. The team at Mapping London Towers likes to think that it knows London’s geography pretty well – after all, we’ve reviewed over 300 other maps here so far. So we assumed that completing this puzzle was going to be straightforward, something to piece together in a short break. How wrong we were – it took three of us nearly six hours each (over three long lunches) to complete the puzzle. There are various challenges making it harder – the map is black and white, which means there are no colour clues, apart from the red banded pieces forming the edge of the puzzle. In addition, as a semi-autobiographical work of the creator, some of the place names are spelt in local vernacular or slang. So going by simple place names is harder than you might expect. Conversely, if you have a good knowledge of historical spots in London, some demographic statistics (such as the area with lowest life expectancy) or can recognise flags and know which London neighbourhoods the corresponding nationality has an established community in, then this can be invaluable. Subtle changes in the density of the penciled buildings can also help. Stephen was never afraid to voice his opinion on many areas, and even be downright derogatory about some of them – perhaps sometimes deserved. But you really need to know London’s rough as well as its smooth, for these to help with the task of solving. The jigsaw puzzle pieces themselves are also...

This stunning map reveals the athletic footprint of London. Strava have taken their huge volume of movement data, recorded by runners, cyclists and other data-enabled fitness peeps and created a heatmap of London (and indeed, the world). Many people use Strava to record their cycle to work, whereas running to work is much rarer, and recreational running is much more likely so, in order to see an alternative, largely non-commuting flow map of London, we have here featured the running data. A street network is still seen, but the brightest lines are no longer the big road arteries of London – instead it is the park roads, athletics tracks, canal towpaths and the Thames footpaths. It shows a London reordered towards two feet rather than four (or two) wheels. The extract at top, centred over the London’s central area, shows four parks in each corner – Regent’s Park, Victoria Park, Greenwich Park and Battersea Park, as hotspots of activity, along with both sides of the Thames, the Regent’s Canal towpath, and Hyde Park. Two blurred areas – at Canary Wharf and the eastern part of the City of London – are likely a combination of a large number of runners and the GPS multipath-interference effect of the very tall, close together buildings in these areas. Looking more closely at certain areas, you can start to see the thousands of individual traces in each area, along with local “obstacles”: This obstacle, at Barnes Bridge in west London, is due to be fixed soon with a new underbridge: We featured an earlier version of the map in 2013, back then it only include a month’s worth of data, whereas this latest map includes all the data up to September 2017 (except that marked as private, in...

Tranquil Pavement is an online map recently launched by the Tranquil City project based in London, in association with the Outlandish Cooperative and funded by Organicity. It aims to highlight tranquil places to visit, if the hustle and bustle of city life gets too much, by plotting “crowdsourced “locations – referenced in an Instagram feed – as green circles, and also shows a general overlay map shade of calmness (or otherwise) across the capital. The latter is shown by a white (higher noise/pollution) to green (lower noise/pollution) gradient based on official data from DEFRA and the GLA. A different shade of green, showing park footprints, is underlaid to further emphasise likely tranquil locations. The background map makes a point of naming, and so highlighting, only smaller roads, rather than larger noisy artery roads, and also showing some water features, including, unusually, underground rivers such as the River Fleet. The overall map – tending to green in more suburban outer London, but with green highlights for specific tranquil locations more likely to be in the inner city, results in a rather pleasing to look at – although perhaps grey black would be an even better colour for pollution/noise – representing the murk of an untranquil location. Explore the live map here, or add the #tranquilcitylondon tag to your geotagged photos of London’s peaceful places, on...

The Chiswick Timeline, a mural of maps showing the history of the pleasant west London neighbourhood, was successfully crowdfunded and launched last month. It appears alongside a road as it passes underneath a railway bridge by Turnham Green station. A commemorative book, reproducing the work, is available to buy online or at Foster’s Bookshop on Chiswick’s high street. At Mapping London, we love the idea of a community getting together to brighten up a drab wall in their area, particularly when the artwork commissioned is a map! In this case, it is many maps – even better. The mural features 16 different maps, 8 on each side of the road, from 1593 (Norden’s map of Middlesex) right up to the latest 2018 Legible London map of the area (those attractive pedestrian maps you see on totem poles throughout the inner London, and now extending further out). We feature three of these maps here – at the top is a map by William Knight from 1700 of “Towns, Villages, Gentlemen’s Houses for 20 Miles round London”, it shows that Turn(h)am Green has been around for far longer than the tube station which bears its name. Above is a land-use map drawn by Milne a hundred years later, in 1800. This is a historic “data” map, the colours depicting different land types. Showing choropleths and indeed simply using colour at all on a map was pretty ground-breaking 200+ years ago. The many market gardens around Chiswick are coloured in blue, with orchards in green. Finally, below is the 1949 Ordnance Survey “6 inch to the mile” map, with just the River Thames coloured in, which shows that Chiswick never got fully urbanised – the open lands to the south of the earlier maps have simply become...

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...

Dry January? You might want to look away. From the industry’s official promoter of the fortified Andalusian wine in the UK, comes this map of tapas bars and restaurants in central London where you can be sure of finding a good glass of sherry. The map was published in October last year but we just spotted it now, and we like it! The map was created by illustrator Andy Smith. There’s lots of nice details in it – for example, the “Sherry Ferry” that appears in the Thames, heading towards Canary Wharf, is a reference to a ferry that used to go between two of the Camino bars in London. The plate of Mojama tuna is a nod to the animal that is, like sherry, local to Cadiz. Some tube station roundels and the River Thames appear – two musts with any London map – and the venues themselves are illustrated with numbered circles. A sprinkling of London landmarks are interspersed with names and logos of the bars/restaurants concerned, and various tapas-style snacks. N.B. Be careful if using this as a map to navigate by. The designer has gone beyond the usual bounds of simplifying detail and removing non-key roads, by connecting Farringdon Road and Borough High Street together across an unnamed bridge across the Thames. The former actually goes to Blackfriars Bridge and the latter to London Bridge, which are separated by several other bridges. This will be especially confusing if using the map to navigate after having tried several sherries. Use the London Sherry Trail map to find your venues, then your smartphone mapping platform of choice to work out how to actually get there! You may be able to pick up a paper copy of the map from the venues themeselves...

The Children’s Map of London (sometimes called the Children’s Pictorial Map of London) was drawn by Leslie Bullock and first published by Bartholomew in 1938, the edition here is I believe the original version. All royalties from the sale of the map went to the Hospital for Sick Children in Great Ormond Street (aka GOSH) which appropriately does itself appear on the map. The decorative style brings to mind an older time – perhaps the 1920s, when decorative maps were popular and the Beck tube map had not yet appeared – or perhaps even a map from the 1800s. Despite this, it was likely a good map to navigate by, as it includes most of the street network, and doesn’t distort the geography. A lot has changed of course, since the 1930s – Euston station, for instance, looks a lot grander on the map, as this was before it was pulled down and replaced with a giant shed in the 1960s. It looks more grand than St Pancras even, on this map! University College also gets a nice drawing in, above. We liked also the appearance of the “Cheshire Cheese” on Fleet Street. A pub these days, and back then too, so a slightly curious choice for a map aimed at children, even if it is very historic: It’s a shame also the Zoo doesn’t make it in – the map stops just south of it, but does at least include a note “To the Zoo”. Hamleys doesn’t appear either – another institution that was certainly going strong at the time of this map. The cartography is clear and crisp, with a good balance of style and function. A yellow/red/blue colour scheme is adopted for all buildings and stations, so that the map is...

This hand-sketched map has been produced by Adam Dant and Herb Lester, for the East End Trades Guild, to promote over 200 small businesses based in east and north-east London. Over a hundred of these are independent shops, cafes and restaurants to visit. The map is presented with an unusual projection, focusing on Columbia Road near the bottom of the map (with the greatest concentration of featured businesses) with the rest of the area curving away as you look towards the top. Some places beyond the bounds of the map are included as little adornments attached to the map, which is in the style of a pinboard. Cardboard cutout-style illustrations show some businesses at work, while parks, tube stations and water features also show. The built up fabric between the road network is nicely illustrated with a striped hatching effect: The cartography is really rather lovely, and a million miles away from the ubiquitous Google Maps map with icon pins – it has its place, is accessible and is certainly an “easy” option, but putting points on a standard Google Maps map does not make a “map”. Designing a custom map like this, specifically focused on the structure of the area, gives the subject matter the framing it deserves. Kudos to the guild for commissioning a proper map like this. Here’s the full map in all its glory, click on it to view a larger version (you may need to click again if your browser initially resizes the image): Find out more about the map and the small businesses on it, at Spitalfields Life. Discovered on the Spitalfields Life...

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...

The Mayor of London released a draft version of his New London Plan this week. The plan is full of interesting maps, but one of the nicest looking ones is on the front cover. It’s an illustrative map created by, we believe, artist Jan Kallwejt (portfolio) which combines geographical landmarks, in their approximately correct relative locations, with illustrative features of the London experience – tube station roundels, parks with trees, and building terraces. As this is a plan for the future of London, there are also some future references – tunnel portals for the proposed Crossrail 2, for example. We really like the colour palette – yellow, cream, brown and green predominate. It’s nice also to see a comprehensive map like this, covering the whole of the Greater London Authority area, produced as a pure vector artwork, you can zoom right in for all the lovely detail. Direct link, or download a large version of the map. Discovered through online...

This rather nice diagrammatic map, created by by Premium Tours, looks at the top ranking on TripAdvisor for each cuisine type, for London, and then plots the restaurant concerned, in its approximate geographic location. Each restaurant is represented by a category icon, which varies according to the continent that the cuisine is based in. A few adornments are added – key parks, the River Thames and major London icons. A theoretical road network is also included, although you may want to consult Google Maps or OpenStreetMap to actually navigate to the restaurant concerned. Accompanying the map is an A-Z (well, W) list of the restaurants, with their street addresses. From Piebury Corner (TripAdvisor #1 Scottish restaurant in London) in Islington, to Peckham Bazaar (#1 Albanian), this map crosses culinary as well as geographical boundaries, and, perhaps most interestingly, shows that many of the top “theme” restaurants are not in Zone 1 touristville, but require a bit of urban exploration. We really like the colour palette used, the attractive adornments, and the fact that the map strips superfluous detail right down, making it a lot more interesting and engaging to read by focusing on the restaurants themselves. It really highlights the breadth of London restaurant choices, and that each major cuisine type is well represented right across the inner city. See a large version of the map here. Spotted via...

I have to confess, there was a sharp intake of breathe when this map was unwrapped here at Mapping London towers. We are a big fan of tube maps (we even have a special page just for them) and we know you are too, so discovering a new one is always a bit of a thrill. This is a beautifully designed package, with a roundel-shaped hole cut in the textured card, revealing the glimpse of a tube map with the familiar Transport for London line colours but the lines looking distinctively different – this is a paper geographical tube map of London: Using the famous “Johnston” font for the text throughout (note those diamond-shaped dots on the ‘i’s), and including a detailed description of some of the most architecturally interesting stations on the network, on the reverse, the map folds out to approximately A2 size, covering almost the entire network (Heathrow Terminal 5, Amersham and a couple of other outliers get cheekily omitted). An inset version shows the central London detail and includes a skeletal road network to put this section in context. The main map is presented on a simple white background with just the lines and stations, as well as the River Thames. The map has been curated by Mark Ovenden, well-known transport historian and tube geek, who’s detailed notes about some of the stations make this much more than just a map: Our favourite thing about this map is the paper it is printed on – lovely, grainy paper, and presented in that enticing roundel-adorned card envelope. The map inside arranges familiar colours and names into a different perspective and the notes on the reverse are full of interesting detail. You can get your own piece of tube map design from...