Missing travelling on the London Underground? Now, you can see the trains running, live, on this custom-made circuit board showing thetube network. An array of lights, one for each tube and DLR station, uses open data from Transport for London to show the approximate positions of the full fleet of trains running along the various lines. As trains enter stations, the corresponding LED will light up. So, at a glance, you can see if the Piccadilly Line is down again. There are two versions – a smaller one uses white LEDs for the train positions, while a forthcoming expanded one uses colour LEDs corresponding to trains on the line concerned (the Northern line uses white LEDs, in case you were wondering). The currently available smaller board is still pretty big – 20x15cm – and would make a great bit of electronic wall art for your data-driven apartment. Simply attach a plugged in USB key to provide power. The circuit board is made by TrainTrackr, they also make similar minute metro circuit board maps the MTBA in Boston, with plans to expand to other metro systems with live data feeds. TrainTrackr arose out of the Cambridge Hackspace in the Greater Boston area in the USA. It’s great seeing a small startup taking a concept and making it a physical product – and even better if it involves a map of the iconic London Underground. It’s not the first tube map to appear on a circuit board. An artist produced a one-off tube map circuit board which was a working radio, a few years back. And the original tube map itself, with its 45-degree angles and straight lines, was directly inspired by circuit diagrams (Harry Beck’s 1930s original prototype directly referencing them). Almost all the official...

The season for giving and receiving approaches once again. Here’s Mapping London’s guide to the best gifts for that London, or cartographical, enthusiast in your life: London Poverty Maps (Our Review / Buy on Amazon)This hardback book is an impressive size and is beautifully finished, giving justice to the Charles Booths that provide such a powerful snapshot of London’s deprivation and social variations in the late 19th century. A to Z History of London (Our Review / Buy on Amazon)Using the famous A to Z maps, past and present, to chart the development, change and themes of the capital city.Bomb Damage Maps (Our Review / Buy on Amazon)Collated in one volume, these maps of the damage wrought on London by the second world war, are eye-catching in their detail, colouring individual houses, and provide an insight into a period of dramatic change in the city. Maps of London & Beyond (Our Review / Buy on Amazon)Adam Dant’s many map-underpinned artworks are presented together in this large format book. See also the Mapping London...

Citee has been producing technical T-shirts featuring maps of various cities around the world, including London, for the last year. They are currently crowdfunding for a new black version of the T-shirts, with the map detail overlaid in greys and whites. Citee were kind enough to send a sample of their existing London design, which is a white technical T-shirt with minor roads, railways and housing in light grey, and major roads, rivers and lakes in dark grey. Alex Szabo-Haslam of Citee designs the T-shirts in Sheffield. The map design appears on the front of the shirt, spreading to the edges of both sleeves, and, for London, covers an area stretching from Tooting Common in the south to Archway in the north, and from Brent Cross in the west to Walthamstow in the east. The Thames makes for a striking wavy black line in the middle of the shirt. The map detail, based on a custom OpenStreetMap render, is printed directly onto the 100% polyester technical fabric. The transfer quality is excellent, considering the material it is printed on, with individual detail clear and generally sharp. The combination of the street topography and the noticeable vertical grain of the material is rather pleasing (see my Victoria Park closeup below), and, by restricting the design to white, greys and black, it creates a design that is quite sophisticated and not too in-your-face. The T-shirts themselves are made by American Apparel in the USA, and come in sizes XS-XL (note that US sizes are a little bigger than UK sizes – my XS sample would fit an S and possibly an M here). You can get a London (or other city) technical T directly from Citee or join the Kickstarter to get your design in the...

London’s street network appears on a new cycling jacket – when you shine a light at it! Showerspass, a Portland (Oregon)-based company, has unveiled two new versions of their Elite cycling jacket – “Hi-Vis” and “Torch” versions (each of these are available in Women’s and Men’s cuts). Both of the designs contain MapReflect, which is a rather brilliant idea for using a map design as a reflective panel. The map is a stitched together pattern featuring the street networks for various different cities, including part of London – specifically Whitechapel, Wapping and Rotherhithe in east London, as well as part of the River Thames’s most famous wiggle. You can see the London section in a couple of places – as well as on the main part of the jacket (see bottom photo), it appears on a sleeve: The Hi-Vis jackets are predominately neon green and have the map section in their side panels and underside of the sleeve in two versions – Silver Reflective, where the road/pathlines are black and the spaces between the roads is reflective, and Black Reflective, where the road network itself is reflective, on a black background. The Torch jackets have the colours reversed, so the main body of the jacket is reflective, with the street/path network overlaid in Black. These are pretty intense when you shine a light straight on! More about MapReflect on the Showerspass blog. Showerspass approached me a while ago about obtaining the map graphic, which I put together for them. It’s OpenStreetMap data (© OpenStreetMap contributors) for a number of city centres, woven together. The cities chosen include London and Portland, as well as other cities known for a strong urban cycling culture and a regular high density of streets in their...

If you lack a sense of direction and resort to writing directions on scraps of paper or the palm of your hand, this glove is for you. It was designed for George Shove in 1851 and shows the Great Exhibition, held in Hyde Park, and its surroundings. I would hate to think how many pairs of gloves you would need for all of London though! [I can’t find a definitive source. I got the above image from here and it is credited to the National Archives in...