Adam Dant, artist, creates art which is often based around a geographical location, using cartography to frame a topic, often drawing out a key road or other structure into a simple geometric shape. This is particularly evident The Gilded Desert, which uses the famous King’s Road, drawn here as a straight line through the heart of the work, to illustrate locations in Chelsea associated with artists. The road bisects two other straight lines, the Thames/Cheyne Walk and Fulham Road, with other roads curved between the three. The straight roads are beams of light, eminating from a corner, with artist tryptyches shown as sparkles. The Gilded Desert is available at TAG Fine Arts. © Adam...

Quite a bit of creative activity is going on in the south-west London borough of Wandsworth, as this map & guide, produced late last year, illustrates well. Art hotspots are picked out subtly as numbers (with caption on the back) while illustrations of landmark buildings, parks, and people give it a real-world feel. This being a London map, tube and railway stations are also highlighted. The map was drawn by Dale Crosby...

The FT has run a couple of articles [$] recently on housing in Peckham and the Old Kent Road area in south-east London – the latter being the focus of an extension – some day – of the Bakerloo tube line – and to accompany both of them, they commissioned freelance illustrator Laura Hallett to draw these illustrations of the area. We like the distinctive colour accents for the maps, with roads and terrain in different shades of the same hue. Road names give a general indication of the location, and the meticulously detailed illustrations of places of interest help bring the area to life. Key railway stations are highlighted with illustrations of their signs outside. Trees remind the viewer that it’s a green part of the capital. The overall cartography is a nice balance of detail and attractiveness, and the watercolour “grain” gives it a crisp, historical feel. © Laura...

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 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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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 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...

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...

Jones & Sawers’ Map of Fictional London is an a hand-drawn typographic map of central London, where the street and park names are replaced with the names of the novels, plays and other works that mention them. Over 600 such pieces are named on the map. The cartography is rather attractive, with pastel shades and the literary placenames written on in an attractive font. The work is produced by The Literary Gift Company and is available through them or Present Indicative, in both folded and poster forms. We love the clear and attractive cartography and the detail in the map – a key on the reverse of the map links each story to the real street name and quotes the specific line in the work that references the street (or park), allowing you to create your own literary tour, taking your own route through the centre of the capital. Buy a copy of this lovely map here – currently at £5.99 for the folded version, it’s a nice stocking filler for that London literary map geek you know! Thank you to the Literary Gift Company for sending a review...

Not all maps of London need to cover the whole, 33 borough, 8 million-population metropolis. Here’s three maps that focus more on a local area: 1. Tottenham This attractive little map promotes a number of the new start-up businesses in the area – including a climbing wall, a brewery/bar, and arts centre and a concept “healthy” fried chicken restaurant. It was created by Pencil Bandit. 2. Southall This map of Southall in west London was created by James Merry. It illustrates the key buildings on Southall’s key streets, and helpfully includes an inset map of London, showing Southall’s location relative to the rest of the capital sprawl. The noise of Heathrow airport is never far away from Southall and the map shows where the planes are landing – just to the west! 3. South-East London Finally, this sketch map of inner SE London was created by the excellently named Running for Crayons. It’s a colourful, energetic map, showing that there’s a lot of interesting things going on in an area tradionally off the tourist trails. The maps are the copyright of their respective...

Map on Table is a project, currently being crowdfunded on Kickstarter by Hasan Agar, to machine-cut a bespoke, ornate metallic map of central London, apply a colour finish and mount it on four legs to create a small table. The table corners have markers showing the cardinal directions on them. A rendering of Agar’s map, with additional waymark names added – not on the physical product, can be seen below. We really like the way the road network is carefully reproduced, the wave detailing for the the River Thames, and little tree shapes representing the extents of central London parks. If you look more carefully, more and more careful detail appears. The cuts in the metal form the roads, allowing the network to “shine through” the table surface. Certain key buildings are shown symbolically. The British Museum’s famous front portico is drawn, as is the market building in Covent Garden. Horses and guards are shown beside Whitehall, and Leicester Square has a film director’s clapperboard. Overall, it’s a lovely map, beautifully designed, and looks fantastic when machined in metal. It’s almost too nice to place anything on the table itself. You can see the prototype tables in all their cartographical glory in this promotional video, and you can join the Kickstarter here. There is also a New York City version. All photos courtesy of Hasan...

We featured Bridges of London earlier this week. However, the public realm relating to the Thames is more than the river itself and the bridges crossing it. One of London’s defining features, in recent times, as the Thames has cleaned and the spaces beside it have become less-traffic choked, is its riverside frontage. This lovely new illustrated map by Martin Thompson focuses both on the bridges and on the public realm beside the river. Running from Canary Wharf and Greenwich in the east, to Battersea Park in the west, it includes beautiful sketches of the 12 foot-accessible bridges in this section, the iconic buildings alongside, and other little details, such as the lost (that is, now underground) smaller rivers that meet the Thames in this central part of the capital. Martin redraws the river as a straight line of fixed width, with the buildings on either side flaring out and away from it. Most of London’s main tourist attractions, are in fact, not far from the River Thames, so the sketch encapsulates many of London’s most notable landmarks. The bridge detail is lovely: Intriguingly, Martin uses brown to show the river, rather than the usual blue. You would think this would result in muddy, murky illustration, however it turns out it works really well, contrasting with the colour and detail of the riverbanks, and the blue of the skies beyond, on either side. Martin has plans to print to order giclee prints of the work, contact him via his website for further details. Images courtesy of the...

The River Thames is London’s defining geographical feature and its inclusion is almost mandatory on any map attempting to cover the whole of the capital. Bridges are most Londoners’ visible contact with the river, with over 30 spanning the river in London, including elevated crossing by the so-called “Underground”. As such, illustrated maps of the Thames are a popular produced work that Londoners can relate to. This hand-drawn artwork by illustrator Lis Watkins show the bridges in their approximately correct geographical position, and correct distances apart, although the width of the Thames itself is greatly exaggerated, as a fish jumping out of the river announces in a little speech bubble! Sketches of all 35 bridges that are within the Greater London boundary are included, as close as possible to the bridge itself concerned on the map. The map includes the outlines of major parks beside the river, and a lovely bridge-themed title panel, adorned with architectural elements of the bridges themselves. The map was commissioned by the AA and Londonist. See a full-size version here. Spotted via...

This map created by illustrator Mike Hall (who we’ve featured before) for Penguin Books, shows the locations in London that featured in John le Carré’s George Smiley spy novels. This is a lovely map, drawn from scratch and using a distinctive yellow/green and pastel blue pastel colour palette that evokes classic literary works and hand-printed maps. Illustrated vignettes, positioned near their actual location, show the houses and scenes. Tube stations, parks and railways are also woven into the map, with careful cartography and labelling by Mike ensuring the map does not clutter and is attractive to look at. Some subtle digital paper “grain” in the map background, when you zoom in close, adds to the vintage feel: The map was commissioned by Penguin to mark the forthcoming release of A Legacy of Spies, after more than 25 years since the previous George Smiley novel. The new book is published on 7 September. You can see the full map as a PDF here. Copyright Mike Hall and reproduced with kind...

This artistic map of central London attractions was drawn by illustrator Andy Smith for Chiltern Railway, as part of a promotion to attract families into London during the summer holidays. We like the bold and unusual colour scheme for the map, of maroons, pinks and oranges. It’s fairly unusual to see the Thames in pink but it works with the theme! We also like the predominance of bicycles appearing, and especially the “Boris Bike” unofficial nickname for the bikeshare, appearing prominently. It may never have been a term that the authorities have used, but, with the official names always being long-winded, it is something that has stuck! The map is an artwork but is approximately topologically correct, revealing just how much there is to do on a central London day-trip. Copyright Andy...

It’s a typical August day in London today, with the rain falling pretty heavily and at least one tube station closed due to flooding. London’s greatest long-term flooding threat, though, is from isothermal expansion of the world’s water (i.e. it needs slightly more space as it heats) due to climate change. The above map was produced by Jeffrey Linn, showing what London would look like if submerged by 40 metres of seawater, which would happen due to the isothermal expansion happening by a temperature change that would cause 2/3rds of the world’s ice sheets to melt. Blues show the underwater regions, while greens and yellows show land that is dry – for the time being. Unsurprisingly, Thames-side London is well and truly in the drink, with some new islands appearing at Wimbledon Common, Kingston Hill and Richmond Park, while Shooters Hill, Crystal Palace, Highgate and Epping Forest form new peninsulas. Dark blues show particularly deep water – as well as the Thames itself, the Bluewater shopping centre, currently deep inside a chalk quarry, becomes a dark pool. This is a nice looking, if alarming, piece of cartography by Jeffrey, using the classic altitude and bathymetric colour ramps made famous from the Times Atlas and other classic physical maps of the world, with the lush, verdant greens of low-lying areas offset by the barren yellows and browns of higher places. The existing main road map is lightly superimposed in grey, to ground this map in current reality and allow for easy checking of the under/above water status of your neighbourhood. Quite a bit of climate change will have had to have happened for this scenario to happen. A more pressing scenario, showing a water rise of just 10 metres, will still put plenty of London...

We’ve long been fans of artist Stephen Walter’s monochromatic cartographical style and have featured numerous map-based artworks by him over the years. It’s been interesting seeing his style subtly evolve, from intense and slightly angry detections of “seas” of houses and caustic comments, to the slightly more restrained, but still very distinctive, style of his more recent works, including this piece, “Mayfair & St James”. The work covers the opulent Mayfair and St James’s districts of London, in Stephen’s forensically detailed “sketching” style but with the addition of gold leaf to highlight certain roads and park areas. The glint of the gold leaf adds an appropriate sparkle to the map of the area. Stephen has also extensively written labels vertically, with lines of letters falling down. This helps with the annotation of the area and is a rather pleasing style that makes it feel less like just being an intensively detailed map. The vertical writing, and level of detail, ensures this is a work that people will spend quite a bit of time looking at. The work is co-published by by TAG Fine Arts and Shapero Modern and the work is available in an signed and numbered edition of 75 from the two galleries. Thanks to TAG Fine Arts for inviting Mapping London to the London Original Print Fair, where this work was...

This is one of seven London neighborhood maps, each drawn by different artists from the University of the Arts London and recently released by the Walk with Me project. This map, of Dalston and Stoke Newington in north-east London, was drawn by Martina Paukova. We like the distinctive shade of blue used for the map itself, with some blocks shaded in a darker blue, speckled grey, pink or yellow to provide contrast. Parks appear in purple, with very rounded corners, to contrast with the angular street network. Various animals, people and large houses are colourfully scattered throughout the map. Cats playing with balls, round blue trees, smiling post-boxes and other whimsical adornments and interest to the map. A small amount of road and park labels adds utility to the map without distracting from the visual impact. You can buy a print of the artwork on the Walk with Me website. Via LakesClaire, Stanfords and...

The Great British Colouring Map taps into a sudden enthusiasm for adult colouring-in books, by taking Ordnance Survey maps of many classic British places, stripping out all the colour, shading, labels and above-ground contours, and inviting the reader to use their colouring pencils to shade and tone it as they please. The book, published by Laurence King in close association with the Ordnance Survey themselves, is big, and printed on suitably rough-textured art paper that is ideal for pencils. We’ve chosen to review it here on Mapping London because the centre-fold of the book, which folds out into four pages (over a metre wide – that’s going to keep you busy colouring for a while!) features central London, with the unmistakeable wiggles of the River Thames: The book cover also shows the Thames’ most famous meander. The book’s maps range from the classic Landranger “pink cover” 1:50000 maps, the more recent Explorer 1:25000 range, and also some directly derived from the vector OS Open Map Local, shown at an approximate 1:10000 scale. Outside of London, a mixture of both urban and rural landscapes are presented for your colouring pleasure, from the Norfolk Broads to Mount Snowdon. Even Milton Keynes gets an inclusion, for all of you that have always wanted to colour in its hundreds of roundabouts. You can buy the Great British Colouring Map on Amazon and at all good bookstores, with a sticker price of £19.95. Thanks to the Ordnance Survey for sending a review...

Curiocity is a weighty tome, written by Henry Eliot and Matt Lloyd-Rose and published recently by Particular Books. The book follows on from a short, alphabetically organised series of pocket maps, some of which that we featured (C) a few years ago (D). This is a book which certainly delivers on its back-cover promise to “see London differently”. The work is eclectic, stretching to 452 pages long and bound attractively in a rough fabric cover. The title and front-page font being in the font “Johnston” famously seen on all signs on the London Underground. The title itself contains two footnotes, and the indices include sections by year, people, place, day of year, day of month and day of week, time of day, fonts and even a puzzle. With this level of detail, before even considering the main body of text, you know you are in for a treat. The book is loosely structured in chapters from A to Z, or Atlas to Zones, but when that goes via Hagiolatry, Mint and Wyrd, then that gives some indication of the quirky nature of the topics written about, and that this is not a “conventional” London guide – more a compendium of miscellany than a discourse on history or geography, although it includes plenty of both of those too. There are footnotes galore – many pages have several, allowing the more specialist-interest reader to get the extra detail they desire. The book includes a numerous artistic maps, commissioned specially, and produced by a number of artists, and it is just four of our personal favourites, from within the book, that we feature and review here: 1. The Thames Archipelago (top) Mapping the more significant islands that are on the River Thames as it flows through London...

Here’s a great new mural that’s has just been unveiled in Clapham, where it appears on the side of a wall. The Clapham Cultural Map was drawn by Jenni Sparks (we featured her map of London a few years ago and was commissioned by This is Clapham, the Business Improvement District corporation for the area. The map follows Jenni’s signature style of black-and-white building outlines set isometrically, with places of interest appearing coloured in. Clapham’s famous common adds a large splash of green to the map, drawing the eye in. The blue plaque also add historical interest: Here is a pic of the map in situ: You can see more pics of the map on the artist’s portfolio page. Via Twitter. Top two photos by Jenni Sparks, bottom photo by Cllr Wellbelove on Twitter. The work is copyright Jenni...

Here’s a nice hand-drawn map created by graphic designer John Hathaway, of his neighborhood, Acton in west London, along with some local landmarks. We like the good, crisp cartography and the detail, particularly the individual trees and the Robin Reliant! Event better, here’s a speeded-up video of the creation of the map itself: Sent by the...

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

I’ve seen maps of food locations in London before, but not one actually made of food. Food 4 Thought, created by artist Ali Zaidi a few years ago, for “Multiwalks”, a mobile tours platform, has a distinctly organic feel to it. Lower Marsh, a street full of eateries near Waterloo station, is mapped in detail with food items. The nearby street structure is also mapped out in a similar way, with building areas made out of lentils, a nearby public park made out of green peas, and the trains in Waterloo Station itself represented with long lines of red kidney beans. The effect is rather delicious! Some more information about the project is here. The graphic accompanied a mobile app walking tour that is sadly no longer available to...

These attractive hand-drawn maps have been produced for a pocket guide “London’s Canals & Rivers” published by the Canal & River Trust by illustrator and cartographer Bek Cruddace. They show the navigable waterways around London, including the Thames and Lea Rivers and the Regent’s and Grand Union canals. The maps are designed for walkers and cyclists using the towpaths beside the canals. The locations of the locks are marked, as are tube and railway stations, allowing a one-way walk to be planned. Insets show key sections where a specific route is needed: I really like the strong but not garish colours, the subtle textures applied to the parks and urban areas, the hand-drawn tube roundels, and the attractive fonts. The rounded corners of the water features and parks also act to smooth and soften the graphic. It all comes together to create a both attractive and useful map. Visit more of Bek’s creations, or her Etsy shop – with some more London cartographical artwork coming...

Argotopolis is a map of London slang, created by Adam Dant (cartographer) and Jonathon Green (lexicographer). At first glance it looks like an ornate tree, look more closely and you’ll realise it is indeed a map, with Farringdon Road acting as the trunk of an “Old Oak” (aka the “Big Smoke”, aka London) – and with leaves clustering around branches of the trunk. Each group of leaves outlines the slang associated with a particular profession that is traditionally clustered around the corresponding geographical location. For example, at Bank, represented by a little Royal Exchange building subtitled “Lucre” and sitting on a branch that splits four ways, the leaves surrounding the building read “Gelt” and “Sponds”, amongst others. The northern tip of Bishopsgate, i.e. Shoreditch, has “Hipsters” around the Tea Building – aka “Amazeballs” or “Humblebrag”. Recently, Londoners have become astomoned to giving nicknames to the various crazy tall towers sprouting in the City, and there is a branch for that, with the Gherkin sprouting leaves with the names of other skyscrapers, planned or built – namely the Cheesegrater, Walkie Talkie and the Can of Ham, to name but three. It’s really rather fascinating to study, especially once you spot all the detail hidden in the “branches”. Being a hand-drawn piece of artistic cartography, created by the careful hand of Adam Dant, the colours are appropriately arboreal and the piece is very pleasing to the eye. A hand-tinted limited edition print of the map is available at TAG Fine Arts. Spotted on Spitalfields Life. The map is the copyright of its creators – scanned by TAG Fine...

Every year, for the last few years, Mapping London editors Oliver and James have been invited to create and submit an artwork for 10×10 London, a charity art auction organised by Article 25, the architectural development charity (originally called Architects for Aid). Being neither artists or architects, it is very flattering that we have been invited to contribute to this good cause. We create our submissions as “data driven” art, using geographical data, GIS and other software to produce the work, along with a large-format plotter and canvas paper, and a skilled canvas mounter (Miles) in the department drawing office. This year’s 10×10 project is themed “Drawing the River” and each participant is assigned a square alongside the River Thames in central London, to interpret in their own way and product an artwork from. Our square was near Lambeth Bridge, so we decided to utilise the Environment Agency’s huge and newly opened archive of LIDAR-derived digital elevation models (DEMs), which have just been released with an open data licence allowing for easy access and reuse. We downloaded the DTM (the DEM which includes buildings) of the area, which has the terrain heights at 50cm resolution (horizontal) and 0.1cm (vertical) and then used multidirectional hillshading to draw out the building structures and shapes. The image was then vectorised and a filter was used to reduce the speckle and noise and further draw out the relief, with a gradient finally added to emphasise the contrast of the River Thames and adjoining land. We were particularly pleased by some of the features that were brought out using the combination of these techniques, such as the large trees in Archbishop’s Park – the graphic here is from EA data and has had no manual intervention: By way of...

Mapping London stumbled upon this lovely cartographic art-piece of London, created by illustrator Josie Shenoy, at her stall at the South Bank Christmas Market (almost underneath the southern end of the Hungerford Bridge that goes across to Charing Cross, near Foyles’s South Bank outpost). It’s called River Thames and is available as a print and in a number of other formats (e.g. notebooks and cards) from the stall as well as online. We really like the combination of landmarks, placenames and flora/fauna. A cartographic trick (variable scaling – like on the tube map) is used to include mentions of all boroughs, including the outermost (hello Havering), while retaining the famous wiggles of the Thames, and the most iconic landmarks in the centre of the capital. There is also another design, of London secrets – it includes the lost rivers that follow under our feet, abandoned and closed tube stations, and other hidden London miscellany. This second design is not on the website yet so you’ll need to go to the stall itself to see it! This is the first in a series of articles featuring great maps that would make good Christmas gifts. Tis the season! Spotted on a walk along the South...

Currency and Cartography is an solo exhibition by artist Justine Smith, available to view in the gallery space at The Map House in Knightsbridge, a specialist map dealer (and treasure trove crammed with thousands of other maps, globes, illustrations and other prints – be warned you will get lost browsing in this small but perfectly formed shop) until 10 October. Justine has combined banknotes from countries around the world, cutting them to match the shapes of national borders and then assembling maps of countries, continents and indeed the whole world. As well as the currency theme, Justine has produced, in collaboration with The Map House especially for this exhibition, the print that we are featuring here: the “Whittington Map”, which is a historic map of central London, gilded with 23.5 carat gold leaf along the complex City street network, and the main roads leading to the Square Mile. The streets on this map therefore really are “paved with gold”, as the phrase from the tale of Dick Whittington and his cat goes. The gleaming Whittington Map are available from the Map House in a limited edition of 30 prints, along with a number of the currency/cutout style maps mentioned above. The Map House has so many treasures that we feel a need to feature more maps from them here! If you do visit, as well as looking at the Currency and Cartography exhibits (in the gallery at the back), don’t miss the many globes at the front space, and the lovely old clockwork devices for showing how the relative positions of the Earth, Sun and Moon change – with candles and devices for focusing them into a sun-equivalent beam. And map drawers full of maps – as far as the eye can see. Finally,...

Artist Gareth J Wood, aka Fuller, unveiled this striking black-and-white map-based artwork over London, yesterday. The work was started way back in 2005, and after a four-year pause, Fuller came back and completed the piece, which is well over a metre wide. The work, which can be seen alongside similar works for Bristol and Purbeck, is hanging at the Clock Tower, which is apartment 5.01 of St Pancras Chambers Apartments – this is the apartment famously on AirB&B and includes the huge clock tower overlooking St Pancras station. The views of King’s Cross (see below), and the intriguing metal steps zigzagging from the room displaying the art, into the ceiling, create a setting that is another great reason to visit. Fuller has picked towers to unveil his work before, including the Shot Tower in Bristol. With works like this, it’s the detail – and the implied commentary, that make it so interesting, and invite a long, careful look. I particularly liked the dog sitting in the middle of the Isle of Dogs, and Paddington Bear standing by the eponymous station – or is it a panda representing the zoo? Lines of cycles stretch along certain roads, suggesting a cycle superhighway future, constrasting with a line of traffic camera symbols stretching along the South Circular. A quadcopter drone sneaks by Canary Wharf, along with pigeons, possibly escaped from a giant birdcage representing 1 Canada Square. London’s “30 mile high street” cuts a line right across the canvas. Fans of the Docklands Light Railway will be familiar of the fairly-exciting section of track just north of Canary Wharf, and here it is shown as we know it to be – an exciting rollercoaster of exciting twists and turns. The Olympics is represented symbolically over a temple,...

London Landmarks is a 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle of a stylised map/view of central London, drawn by Maria Rabinky and produced by Gibsons, and is possibly the most fun map to have arrived the desk of Mapping London Towers for a very long time. Not content with reviewing the box and the individual pieces, we of course had to actually complete the jigsaw puzzle itself, which was achieved by 2-3 people, working fast over 3 two hour sessions earlier this week (so that’s around 12 hours of effort!). We were hoping that our geographical knowledge of central London streets and landmarks would be enough to allow an swift completion of the puzzle – many of the streets and features are named on the map, and there are very few similar coloured pieces – even the Thames helpfully shifts from dark blue to light blue as it heads eastwards – so we hoped this would be an easy puzzle. How wrong we were, as the “birds eye” view of London, looking roughly northeastwards from somewhere above Battersea park. The topology of the puzzle is pretty good – obviously many streets have been omitted for clarity, but buildings appear in the right location when you look at the finished puzzle, even if they don’t appear too when you are putting it together. The toughest building was the Houses of Parliament, as the project used makes it appear huge, and our final piece was the labyrinthine Royal Courts of Justice. Favourite building representations include Waterloo Station (which is represented by its famous four-sided meeting place clock) and London Zoo (which includes a veritable menagerie of animals in a single spot (note there is sadly no panda there in real life). When building the puzzle, we did the traditional...

Thought that the Shaun the Sheeps were the only London pop-up sculpture trail that you were getting this summer? Well the sheep may be gone now, but in their place there are 21 helix sculptures, each painted by a different artist, including celebrities Al Weiwei (on Brompton Road) or Zara Hadid (at Somerset House). This is the Cancer Research UK London Art Trail, or DNA Trail, and it precedes an auction of the sculptures which will raise funds for the Francis Crick Institute, has an accompanying map that we show here. The map is based on data from the OpenStreetMap project (alas uncredited) and uses a purple and pink colour palette, matching the theme of the trail’s commissioner, Cancer Research UK. The cartography is crisp and clear, containing the all-important tube station locations and River Thames that both act as London’s default landmarks. It has just enough detail to allow you to pinpoint the locations of the sculptures, which are spread fairly evenly between South Kensington and St Paul’s – a long afternoon’s stroll might get you them all then! Download the map (PDF) Thanks to the Cancer Research UK Press Office for letting us know about the trail. Map contains OpenStreetMap data which is Copyright OpenStreetMap contributors. Photo credit: Adrian...

After featuring a number of data maps and navigation-focused ones recently, it’s nice to have something completely different. This is “London Mapped Out” (there’s also a Scotland version) which is produced by Couthie. It is a colourful collage of famous sites in central London, from Columbia Road flower market in the north-east, to Wimbledon with Murray Mound and a pitcher of Pimms in the south-west. The graphic captures, in a single print, the sights and experiences that a stereotypical London tourist might want to see. I particularly like the various animals of Lodnon zoo, supplemented by various other animals of the canine variety, being walked over the nearby Primrose Hill. There are prints and postcards, very reasonably priced, of the whole graphic and individual vignettes, on the Couthie website, where you can also explore the full map, at high resolution, online. See the full range here at the Couthie shop or on the artwork’s dedicated website. Thanks to Ruth Alder at Couthie for sending us a review...

The London Thames Path is a brand new book by author/illustrator David Fathers. Like his previous book on the Regent’s Canal, it is an attractively illustrated narrative to walking alongside the water feature, with every double-page having a map, surrounded by pictures and information factoids about the current section. As such, it’s very pleasant to read even if you are not using it as a guide book. The Thames, being the defining geographical feature of London, is packed full of history and the book delivers this well, be it talking about historic monuments and houses alongside the river, to geographical quirks like the Prime Meridian and measurements of the lengths of all the bridges passed. The route is shown as a simple red dotted line, with staircase links and nearby tube/rail stations and piers marked. You could probably manage to walk the Thames Path without this book, but having a guide like this, carefully written by an author with a genuine interest in the route, makes the experience much more interesting. The guide has 127 pages and includes a summary map showing all the crossings on two pages, and a further double-page spread on the Thames Estuary, i.e. further downstream from the section of the Thames (Putney Bridge to the Thames Barrier) that the main guide concentrates on. Where the Thames Path runs on both sides of the river, both sides are included. The London Thames Path is published by Frances Lincoln Publishers and is released on 7 May. You can be among the first to get hold of this gem by ordering it from Amazon for shipping next week. Thanks to David Fathers for sending a review...

Artist Kristjana S Williams, originally from Iceland but now based in west London, specialises in collages of vividly coloured, exotic creatures. A number of her works have included adorning such animals around the edges of old maps – often artworks in their own right – creating a distinctive “frame” around the map and perhaps harking back to the days when maps were the preserves of ocean-going explorers, discovering weird and wonderful things in round-the-world voyages. As well as global maps, Kristjana has worked with a number of London-specific old maps, including Lundanar Kort (excerpt on the right) based on Mogg’s 1806 map we featured only very recently, Round London (above), based on a 1791 map by Paterson, Markets Royale, set upon Cary’s 1824 plan of London, and a Transport for London commission which frames a pre-Beck London Underground map (shown below). Lundanar Kort has several editions of its own, with the same basemap but a differing assortment of fantastic adornments surrounding it. The “Gull Sky” edition includes profile sketches of a number of London buildings, old and new. There’s something very compelling about the mashup of old maps and colourful animals that is hard to pin down! Kristjana is represented by Outline Artists and her work is available at Outline Editions. I first came across her work at the “Art Cartography” solo exhibition late last year at The Map House in Knightsbridge, a rather wonderful map/art dealership which deserves a post of its own here...

Here is an interesting concept by illustrator Russell Bell. He’s taken a pre-WWII (World War 2) monochrome map of the Barbican area of London (the northern-most part of the ancient City of London) and incorporated a modern, coloured map of the main structures that form the Barbican Estate, that was built following the area suffering heavy damage during the WWII Blitz. During the building process, the street layout fundamentally changed, with streets disappearing or changing alignment, and a new lake appearing. By including the modern map as a translucent overlay on the original, the viewer can clearly contrast the old and the new. It’s worth noting that the new is already changing, as a number of the (non-residential) post-war blocks along London Wall, and Milton Court, have already been demolished for further development. Russell has made a number of prints of his map, see his online shop. The Barbican Estate’s multi-levelled structure and maze of “highwalks” means it’s famously being difficult to navigate (which makes it a great orienteering venue), despite various lit maps being available throughout the complex. At one point, famously, orange lines were painted on the ground, to help lead people to the Barbican Arts Centre from the entrances to the estate. Thanks to Russell for the...

This is a new work by Stephen Walter, in his characteristic hand-annotated, monochromatic style. It features London’s watery features, in particular the many waterways. The iconic River Thames (which should always appear on any good London map) is the natural centrepiece, but London has numerous more minor rivers, streams, channels and culverts which form the base of this work. The choice of water is a particularly good one – London’s waterways are scattered throughout the capital, rather than intensifying in the centre as tube lines and houses (the focus of some of the artist’s previous works) do. This results in reasonably even areas of white space, complementing the intense detail for the rivers (and surrounding lands) themselves that are a hallmark of Stephen’s style. The completed work therefore doesn’t overwhelm with information or feel unevenly cramped, so it is rather pleasing to the eye as a complete piece. The artist has used several different font styles to denote different kinds of features, and included various historical annotations, such as marks of major floods. The work can be viewed on the TAG Fine Arts website or at their studio in Islington, where it can also be purchased, as part of an edition of 50. If you are a long-time Mapping London reader and are thinking that this style looks familiar, you’d be right, we’ve featured works by Stephen Walter a couple of times before. We’ve also previous featured maps of underground rivers and even tube-style maps of the waterways. As an aside, prolific London blogger Diamond Geezer‘s 2015 project is walking the Unlost Rivers of London, many of whom are included on the map here. Thank you to TAG Fine Arts for the complementary ticket to the London Art Fair, where The Rivers of London...

We featured Lee’s Bastion of Liberty map, a detailed portrait of London to remind the war-weary 1940s/50s public of the great city that they lived in, in November 2013. We hadn’t seen the map itself, just other references to it on the web, and that’s still the case, but in January this year we got an email from Jan Danielsson, to say he’d found, and bought, a rare copy of the map in an auction in Stockholm. The auction website has an excellent, high-resolution excerpt of the map, we reproduce a couple of excerpts of the excerpt (!) here to give you an ideal of the detail. Our comments from previous article still stand – it’s a gloriously detailed, colourful map, and it’s striking to see the places that have stayed the same over 70 years, much as the places that have changed beyond all recognition. If someone living in London has the physical map, we would love to take a look. Thank you to Jan to emailing us about his purchase and the link to the auction site, and Auktionsverket for posting high-resolution...

Mapping London editors James and Ollie were invited earlier this year to create a drawing for the 10×10 charity auction taking place later this week in London. The auction is organised by Article 25, an architectural charity (we took part last year too) and each invited artist is assigned a grid square somewhere in central London, to act as a focal point for producing an artwork. This year, our assigned square was in Bermondsey, just out from London Bridge Station and including Bermondsey Street and Tooley Street. It’s an area teeming with history, and one that has evolved rapidly recently. With that in mind, we wanted to focus on revealing the past in an unusual way, so we started with an old Ordnance Survey map, a scan of which was kindly loaned to us by the London School of Economics. We took the scan and reworked the colours and fonts, to give it a more contemporary look while still retaining the historic structure. The work is digitally printed onto a 60x60cm art canvas, then mounted on a simple wooden frame. The texture of the canvas blends nicely with the original building footprints that we have retained, and contrasts well with our modern colours. It is unique, an edition of 1! For the caption, we wrote: This artwork reinterprets an 1895 Ordnance Survey map of Borough/Bermondsey in a modern way, recolouring and highlighting key features to present a new view of a historic and culturally rich neighbourhood. When studying the original map, we were struck by the quantity and variety of industry present in the area 119 years ago. Each factory has been carefully relabelled in a modern font while retaining the old spelling. From leather tanning to chocolate making, by way of a brewery,...

We’d thought we’d put together a list of our favourite London map gifts that are in the shops, as last year‘s list proved popular. 1. London: The Information Capital This brand new book by Mapping London co-editor James Cheshire, contains “100 maps and graphics that will change how you view the city” and it certainly is a book that sits at the intersection of London, mapping and data. It’s a book as much about data map design as it is about London, as it contains various innovative graphic techniques and map designs to show London’s data, old and new. From a time chart of activities of London’s police helicopter, through a colourful ribbon graphic of every census statistic across every part of London, to . We’ve featured a number of the graphics in previous posts too. The book’s RRP is £25 and it is currently selling like hot mince pies on Amazon and in various bookshops across London and beyond. (Full disclosure: I contributed a small number of the graphics in the book.) 2. Map of London’s Craft Breweries Craft breweries have bring springing up in all corners of London recently, as the capital has acquired a taste for chilled, hoppy local brews rather than the big chains. Blue Crow Media have produced this lovely poster showing all the locations of the breweries, many of which have tap rooms open at certain times, where you can try out the beers, fresh! It’s £12.50 in their online shop. One craft brewery we particularly like is the Hammerton Brewery in Islington. Their beer is nice, and as a bonus, they have maps of London on their bottle labels! 3. Nairn’s London There is a new reprinting of Nairn’s London, a 1966 classic, quirky guide to a...

This map, created by illustrator/designer Mike Hall (we previously featured his borough maps) is simply called the “Central London retro style map“. It’s a brand new map, but in the style of designs from the beginning of the last century. Mike was particularly inspired by the typography and limited colour schemes used in maps back then, and applied the styling to a fully up to date including the latest London landmarks such as The Shard and even the course of Crossrail, an underground railway line that has been dug but is not due to open for another four years – shown, with other underground railways, as subtle dashed lines. Blackfriars station is correctly shown extended right across the Thames, as it now does following a recent major upgrade. There are lots of nice cartographical details about this map. I particularly like the parallel line effect used to emphasise the edges of water features such as the Thames, and the attractive fonts used carefully for different features. It’s also quite refreshing to see a modern London map which doesn’t use the tube roundel for tube stations – instead, a simple black dot (For smaller stations) and dark grey shape (for larger ones) is used. The muted colours (mainly light orange, light green, light blue and dark grey) complement each other well, producing a map which doesn’t overwhelm the senses, while providing enough interest to encourage visual exploration. We featured a new map in an old style previously – the Wellington Map harks back to the early 18th century. Mike’s style sits between this overtly old-fashioned look, and the latest auto-generated Google Maps and OpenStreetMap maps that we see on our smartphones and computer screens. His map provides a “touch of class” and reassures me that...

Here’s a beautiful hand-drawn map by Camilla Charnock, who was commissioned to draw it for a new retail development at Sloane Square in west London. I am very enthusiastic about developers commissioning attractive and original maps to promote their developments, it’s so much nicer to see something unique as opposed to a simple online map or an edited Google Map – nothing wrong with these per se, but a bespoke map suggests a genuine passion in setting a new development in its place. This particular graphic appears on the construction hoarding for the project (Duke of York Square, by Cadogan Estates). We’ve previously featured a Camilla Charnock work before – Carte Blanc, a map of restaurants in an up-market chain. Like that piece, this map includes lots of attractive adornments – a dinosaur skeleton for the Natural History Museum, a Chelsea Pensioner and a dalmatian dog (below). The main streets are shown, along with tube stations. Trees and flowers further soften the map. The development itself, shown in a blown-up section, includes the various retail units in pastel colours with symbols for the shopping types, and a few further adornments. Note that, rather unusually, the map is orientated so that upwards is eastwards. Thanks to Camilla for carefully photographing her artwork, joining the pieces together and sending them...

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

This attractive hand-drawn map, by Adam Dant, is of the coffee houses of the City of London in the 1700s. Adam uses the gradual separation of the two main roads heading east from Bank, namely Lombard Street and Cornhill, to create a map of the area in between them that is, itself, shaped like a coffee pot. Each of the 19 coffee houses on the map has a small vignette about it. The map includes Lloyds coffee house, the place where ship owners and merchants met to spread the risk of each voyage amongst themselves, came the Lloyds of London insurance market itself. I like the colours used – various shades of coffee! The map and information is drawn in a clear and uncluttered fashion, with the links out to each story placed as to not obscure the map. Each story itself is surrounded by an apparent coffee stain. Note that west is towards the top of this map. More about this map on Spitalfields Life. Copyright Adam Dant. Found via Spitalfields...

Canalology is a short “festival of contemporary art of the hidden arteries of our city” which is organised by POST and takes place on Saturday (3 May) from noon to 4pm, along the canal beside Tottenham in north-east London. This circular map, which accompanies the official guide to the event that will be available on the day to visitors, has been created by Mary Yacoob, and is a lovely hand-drawn artwork showing the surrounding area. The major features of the map are the many reservoirs of the Walthamstow Wetlands, which lie in the Lea Valley between Tottenham and Walthamstow, and are a source of drinking water for a large part of London. The canal towpath stands out in yellow, while the roads and railway lines are more muted. Stroke-based textures are used to show the different terrain types. A series of vignettes around the map offer a glimpse of the scenery characteristic of the area – canalboats, allotments, powerlines… By coincidence, ages ago I blogged about another map of the same area, this time forming part of a local...

City of Westminster is the first in a series of hand-made maps of London Boroughs that Lovely Jojo has drawn. The black-and-white, text-heavy style, full of commentary as well as placenames, reminded me at first of Stephen Walter’s maps, however on looking closer, the style is quite different, with an alternative interpretation of each object and place. The styling is not quite as intense, giving the map space to “breathe” while still featuring a huge number of vignettes across the borough. Lovely Jojo has produced a limited number of prints of the City of Westminster map, on fine art paper, which can be purchased from her online shop. The artist has plans to map the other boroughs but she acknowledges it will take quite some time. Her Twitter feeds hints at a Hackney map on the way. I look forward to my own borough appearing! Thanks to Lovely Jojo for sending a review copy, which is photographed...

At first glance, this looks like a photo of London at night, maybe from the International Space Station (ISS) or another satellite. Creator Marc Khachfe hasn’t commissioned NASA to take photos for him though, instead he’s used OpenStreetMap data and painstakingly built up a pseudo-photographic map in this distinctive style. Building and roads (of different types) are carefully coloured to mimic the effect of streetlights, a number of filters being applied, and compositing operations carried out, to produce the nighttime “glow”. The final map, especially when printed large on glossy photo paper, is quite compelling. Marc was inspired by the amazing photographs of cities at night that Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield regularly tweeted from the ISS. He’s produced maps for a number of cities. Each city has tended to have been mapped in OpenStreetMap in different ways, so a different treatment is normally needed for each one, to produce the effect. Of course, being maps, rather than photos, the detail is super sharp and you can see individual streets if you look carefully! There’s more of Marc’s satellite-esque maps on his Flickr page, and the artist has an Etsy store where you can buy bespoke copies of the images. Marc is also exhibiting the maps at the RAW London art fair on 1 May. Image reproduced here courtesy of Marc Khachfe. Marc also visited Mapping London Towers to show off a physical print, to considerable office...

Earlier this week I did a “map swap” with Matt Brown, editor of Londonist, the popular London website. This lovely hand-drawn map, created by Matt himself and the Londonist team, shows a London, or Lundenwic, as it might have been in Anglo-Saxon times (i.e. pre-1066 but post-Roman). Matt has taken a high-resolution scan of the hand-drawn background map and created a digital layer on top for placenames. This means that, as continued research (including feedback from Londonist readers) uncovers further Anglo-Saxon names for the pre-1066 villages that now make up the London area, they can be added seamlessly onto the map while preserving the hand-drawn original. I was really interested to discover that the locality near here at CASA Towers (on Tottenham Court Road) used to be known as Tottenheale. That name has a coincidental resemblance to Tottenham Hale, a station many miles away that tourists occasionally end up by accident when trying to find Tottenham Court Road. The map shows that Tottenham itself was known simply as Tota, in Anglo-Saxon times. Many names are quite recognisable and perhaps the surprise for these is that they were in existence at all around ~1000 years ago, as these days they feel like very modern parts of London – for example, Brixges Stane (Brixton), Cloppanham (Clapham) and Haca’esey (Hackney). Other names are much less obvious – Aetheredes Hyth is now known as Rotherhithe. Giseldone is, I think, now Islington. The map includes the historical (mainly Roman) roads of London, too. Some of these are hard to spot in modern times, but Matt has had a good go at lining these up on the hand-drawn map. And there are many more rivers on the map than you’ll see today – they are still there, but most have...

We are big fans of maps based on a circle and of Adam Dant’s work so this map, which combines the two, is a real delight. It was commissioned for the Museum of London Docklands as part of their Many East Ends exhibition. All roads lead to Stratford! Thanks to Spitalfields Life for featuring this work. There is a larger version there, where you can make out the speech bubbles. Or you can see the real thing, along with an East End Monopoly board, at the small exhibition at the museum...

Today, Mapping London brings you not one, but eight maps from prolific cartographer/artist Adam Dant, via the excellent hyper-local blog Spitalfields Life. Firstly, Stories of Shoreditch Old & New is a series of four maps showing the same view of Shoreditch in Tudor, Georgian, Victorian and modern times. The north/south street of Shoreditch itself (later Shoreditch High Street and Bishopsgate) remains on all four maps as the focal point, while other streets in the locality variously change names, orientations, or even disappear. Each map includes a set of numbered vignettes of local curiosities from the time, which are detailed in the blogpost. Each of the four maps has a distinct colour. It’s great being able to contrast the four, and it brings a lovely historical context to an area perhaps now most famous for its nightlife. Adam has also drawn four fanciful maps of Shoreditch: in dreams, as a globe, as New York and in the year 3000 – the last presenting “a historical guide to Shoreditch – how to visit the ruins”. Our favourite is the New York one, where an isometric map of the London neighbourhood retains the modern road layout, but with buildings considerably elevated in height and Americanised in style. Shoreditch High Street becomes Shoreditch Avenue, leading to Kingsland Broadway. Arnold Circus takes on the appearance of Madison Square Garden and the railway lands near Shoreditch High Street Station look something like Central Park. We also really like the dystopian feel and eerie yellow/purple colour-scheme of the Year 3000 map. We look forward to futher cartographic delights from the pen of Adam Dant. All of the maps are © Adam Dant and were found on Spitalfields Life, which today was named as London’s city blog by The Guardian’s cities...

This decorative map was published in or around 1946, as a commemorative keepsake for a weary city and a population that had just been through the Second World War, including The Blitz. It was designed by an artist, Kerry Lee. The map map approximately shows the modern-day “Zone 1” of central London, and is surrounded by vignettes of attractions in London and further afield: The “busy” pictorial design, with numerous colours, gives a post-war London a wonderfully medieval look – even if the bombed areas of London were subsequently built to designs that were anything but old. Despite being a decorative print, it adheres to good cartographic principals, with consistent colours for features, and is approximately geographically correct. Some roads are “obstructed”, however, with shields, people and other ornaments and flourishes. A bit of trivia – the map includes a vignette for Theobald’s Park, which is to the north of London, which intriguingly shows the Temple Bar, a structure which will be familiar to those who frequent the City of London. It used to be on Fleet Street, but, as a traffic obstacle, it was moved to the park for many years, including the time when the map was drawn, it has now been relocated to Paternoster Square, by St Paul’s Cathedral, much closer to its original location, and no longer anywhere near Theobald’s Park. We first heard about the map from geographer Dieter van Werkum. He mentions also that there appear to have been at least two slightly different versions, one with a copyright notice of the “Travel Association of Great Britain and Ireland” appearing the right-hand side. There is very little information available about it on the internet, although are a few bits and pieces to be found – for example it...

Above is a small part of the “Wonderground Map of London Town” – MacDonald Gill created this fantastic decorative map, which was commissioned to provide a distraction for London Underground passengers as they waited for their next train. The map was drawn in 1914, it became such a hit that the aformentioned passengers would sometimes miss their train as they were too busy looking at the map. I love how the map is the very opposite of a network map – how it crams in so much detail in a time that maps were starting to simplify and become more practical and “cleaner”. It’s a map designed to be looked at, not glanced at. The exhibition, where this map is currently being displayed, is “Out of the Shadows: MacDonald Gill” which is at the PM Gallery and House in Ealing Broadway. It is showing this map and others of London, including the bus map we featured when it was at the Transport Museum last year. The exhibition also is showing many of the other maps created by MacDonald Gill, and includes some interesting facts. For example: MacDonald Gill’s brother Eric who created Gill Sans, the clean font which was based on Johnston, the principal font still used by Transport for London. You have one more day to see the exhibition! It’s free, and closes tomorrow (Saturday) at 5pm. More details here. Your author visited the exhibition yesterday (Thursday) and took these photos of the map. It is well worth the trip...

Here’s a lovely hand-drawn map of central London with a linguistic twist. It has been commissioned by the Brasserie Blanc restaurant group to celebrate Trafalgar Day (the anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar) which is today. It was created by artist & cartographer Camilla Charnock. Spot “Le Pont de la Tour” and “L’Eclat”. How about “L’Oeil de Londres”? Some things will never fully translate though – London’s newest skyscraper remains “Le Talkie Walkie”. The Brasserie Blanc restaurants will apparently using paper copies of the map as placemats! I may have just found a great excuse for a meal out this week. [Update – You can download a high-quality PDF of a version of the map...

The London Thames is a new poster – a small extract is shown here – created by David Fathers, which features illustrations of the 16 bridges that cross the river in central London, along with key riverside structures and institutions, and lots of nuggets of information about each. The River Thames is the defining natural landmark of the city, and as such it makes sense to have a poster dedicated to it! The poster has an attractive design,with a turquoise and shaded grey colour scheme, and the illustrations have the 3D pastel-shaded look that are a hallmark of David’s work. We reviewed his book on the Regent’s Canal last year – the other “cross London” water channel. More details about the poster are on David’s website. Thanks to David for sending a review...

London dissected is the latest brilliant edition of the Curiocity maps series. For the princely sum of £2.50 you can purchase this gory interpretation of the capital then read it on the Tube, as I did, to enjoy the slightly nervous looks of fellow passengers who were clearly a bit unsure of my chosen literature. The map is brilliantly illustrated by  Nicole Mollett and packed with interesting things to do in the often over-looked parts of the capital. Think of it as Body Worlds meets Time...

Mappa Lundi is a hand-drawn map of central London which simplifies the street network, districts, parks and tourist attractions into a simple, pseudo-grid like structure. Matt Lancashire created the map back in May 2010. You can see it on Flickr. We like the careful use of colour to distinguish streets, areas and parks, the inclusions of the Regent’s Canal and the Thames which bookend the mapped area, and the near adherence to the principles of a grid for the street network (resulting in some distance distortion), but with a few diagonals and other directions where needed. London’s main street network has never looked so ordered. A cross between a geographical map and a street-level version of the Beck-style tube map. Available under a Creative Common’s CC-By-NC licence by Matt...

Stephen Walter, most famous for his “Hub” map of London, a fantastically detailed hand drawn map of London with a distinctive repeating style and thousands of anecdotes drawn into it, has a solo exhibition at Londonewcastle in Shoreditch, for the next month. As well as his London “patchwork quilt” maps, the exhibition includes some other artwork such as a sea of bicycles, and more abstract “icon” artworks, of which an extract of one is below. The extract above is from London Subterranea, a commission for the Transport Museum, which focuses on networks and features below ground. The tube lines are shown inverted, so the DLR (in the extract here) appears to emerge from the earth at the point it actually goes underground. Another highlight, which takes up an entire wall at the exhibition, is extracts of “Hub” for each of London’s 32 boroughs and the City, each individually framed and then arranged on the wall pseudogeographically. The gallery space itself has a minimalist industrial feel to it, which complements the largely black-and-white pencil-drawn work that is Stephen’s signature style. The exhibition is free and definitely worth taking the time to visit. It closes on 27 July. Thanks to TAG Fine Arts for inviting Mapping London to the exhibition...

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

The above is just a small extract from Stephen Walter’s “Hub” Map of London, a hand-drawn map of painstaking detail, drawn during 2007-8. You can see the full version of Stephen’s map on his website, along with his most famous work “The Island”, which is in a similar but more autobiographical style, and featured in a British Library exhibition London, and London Subterranea, which was commissioned by the London Transport Museum. Stephen is exhibiting his cartographic work, including new material and an interactive exhibit, at an exhibition, From the Anthropocene, at the Londonewcastle project space on Redchurch Street in Shoreditch, from 3 to 26 July. The exhibition is presented by TAG Fine Arts. Map copyright Stephen...

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...

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...

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...

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

This 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...

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...

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...

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...

It seems there is no escaping typographic maps of London, the idea has really taken off over the past couple of years. Axis Maps have been making typographic maps of other cities for a while now and they have finally created one for London. The name of each road has been repeated along its length to build up the street geometry and the big features such as Hyde Park and the River Thames have had their names packed multiple times into their boundaries to make a great textured effect. 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...

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...

Above is an extract from a map of the London Underground, drawn by Max Roberts in the style of Charles Rennie Mackintosh – with sets of parallel lines, squares and exaggerated right angles that are the hallmarks of the early twentieth century Scottish designer. The map shows the tube network as it would have been at the time of Mackintosh’s death in 1928. Thanks to the promotor for inviting me to the exhibition for the launch of the book Underground Maps Unravelled, Explorations in Information Design by Maxwell...

Mike Hall, illustrator and designer, has been painstakingly creating large poster maps of each of the London boroughs, largely by hand. Each map has a different design and theme, drawing on the most famous aspects of the borough. He’s drawn eight boroughs so far and promises more are on the way. Above is the part of the Tower Hamlets map, you can see a thumbnail of the full map below. I like the hand-written street names and that Mike has been careful to keep the map uncluttered by omitting the smaller lanes and alleyways where there is a lack of space. The green spaces are wonderfully illustrated with individual trees being tiled to indicate forested areas. Prominent buildings are shown in isometrically. Every part of the borough has had the same care and attention afforded to it. The maps are available from purchase from his online shop. Thanks to Mike Hall for supplying the imagery & I look forward to my own borough being...

This is an extract of a map produced in 1928 for London Transport by Macdonald Gill. He produced many maps in this “flowery” style, including some maps of the Underground network – a world away from the straight lines and diagrams of Beck that were to come just a few years later. This particular map is entitled “The country bus services map” and extends well out of London – this is just the central part, showing inner-city London (the main built-up area at the time) as surrounded by a theoretical city wall, with towns and villages beyond being highlighted with a scroll. There are various annotations, for example “Stanmore Common affords a good view around”: The extract is part of an image from the London Transport Museum poster collection. The image is on display as part of the Mind the Map exhibition that is running at the museum for the next few months – the photograph I took of the map at the exhibition didn’t come out well, hence why I’m using the official one...

This wonderful map (above is just an extract) has been drawn by artist & illustrator Jenni Sparks. It’s a hand-drawn map of central and inner-city London. Tube/train lines, parks and rivers are coloured, everything else is shown in black-and-white. Buildings are all drawn in a 45-degree isometric style. Annotations reveal characteristics of an area that won’t appear on traditional maps. Dalston comes with a bicycle, plastic-framed glasses and a moustache. Canary Wharf is festooned with various currency symbols. The map is bang up to date – the Shard is shown as completed. The Olympic Stadium also appears, complete with some shining Olympic rings. Further information is on her blog, with A1/A2 prints for sale. Extract from Jenni’s...

A major new exhibition on mapping the London Underground – Mind the Map – opened last week at the Transport Museum in Covent Garden. Mapping London was at the launch and got to look at a huge collection of maps of and about the London Underground. We’ll be featuring some of our favourite maps from the exhibition over the next few weeks. Apologies to all those who already think we feature too many tube maps, there are plenty more on the way! Here’s one of my favourites from the exhibition. When Harry Beck drew his iconic London Underground network map in 1932, full of straight lines and spatial distortions, it was not met with a universally positive reception. Some colleagues at London Transport complained that it looked too much like an electric circuit diagram rather than a geographical map. As if to acknowledge this, Beck drew, as a joke, a version of his map adopting many of the standard electrical components found on a geniune circuit diagram. An aerial and earth appears, and the Bakerloo line becomes “Bakerlite”. The map appeared in London Transport’s internal staff magazine in...

Stamen Design are a bespoke design and technology company based in San Francisco. They have a reputation for creating wonderful looking maps, often with OpenStreetMap data, and their latest map is quite stunning – the Watercolour Map. The textures applied to the map give it a lovely, hand-drawn look, although of course it’s actually some very clever programming that is allowing the imagery to be produced automatically – for the entire world. Stamen go into detail on the textures and the general creation process in wonderful detail on their blog, which also introduces the style and two others. Map imagery CC-By Stamen Design, based on OpenStreetMap data CC-By-SA OpenStreetMap...

James previously featured a tube map made up of just names of the stations. He’s also featured other London typographic maps. Exploring a little further, it turns out there’s some other fine examples out there, often available as prints. The screenshot above is part of a beautiful print by Ursula Hitz – the Greater London Type Map. Below is a print from ORK posters, a City Neighbourhood Poster for the central London area. There is also a version that shows all the boroughs of London. My ideal version would be a hybrid one – showing the neighbourhoods for the whole of London! I do however like the clean and crisp typography, which makes the print slightly less “heavy” than the one above. Both prints would look great in any carto-typophile’s apartment. Screenshots included courtesy of the authors – top: © ursulahitz.com, above: ©2010 Ork...

This cartoon of the area around Trafalgar square is a small section of a rather interesting caricature created by Hartwig Braun, of a view of the West End and the City – looking east from a point somewhere well above Victoria station. It’s not a map – I wouldn’t navigate with this! – but a nice, colourful artwork showing the most iconic buildings and features of the area. Many of the taller buildings appear to “grow out” slightly organically from the ground, emphasising their height more than a photo or map would indicate. The print is dated to 2008 so it’s missing some of London’s most recent changes, such as the Shard and the Heron Tower, and includes the familiar satellite dishes on the BT Tower which have sadly just been removed for safety reasons. But, nit-picking aside, the wealth of detail is impressive. There is individual traffic – tiny little trains (with the appropriate liveries!) leaving Waterloo, horses on the Mall, people in Trafalgar Square, and tour buses around Green Park. Sadly the image doesn’t quite stretch to show the UCL campus, although the University of London’s Senate House is on the horizon. Plenty of Union Flags are fluttering in the breeze, although I was also pleased to somewhat unexpectedly see a Scottish Saltire. If you look really carefully, you can even spot the Queen and some corgis: As well as the full colour one shown here, there is a blue-and-orange version, and a white-on-black one. Arty Globe also sent us an orange-and-black version, which has instantly divided opinion in the office, with everyone very firmly liking one or the other, but never both. You can get these prints by visiting the Arty Globe shop in Greenwich, or through their online store, the...

This* splendid typographic London Underground map arrived in the mappinglondon post tray this morning. Scott at Fadeout Design has simply replaced the track lines with the station names. From a distance it looks like a charcoal sketch of Beck’s iconic design, but close up it has loads of detail. As with all great designs this map understates the amount of work that must have gone into it. It is printed on high quality paper if you want to just stick it to a wall but I recommend framing. That is where I am going in my lunch break… Check out the Fadeout Design website for map of New York (below), Boston, Chicago and a few other US cities. *the pictures are from Scott’s website, my attempts to take a picture of the map I have didn’t do it...

After featuring many very modern maps on Mapping London thus far, it was a pleasure to hear about the Grand Map of London, produced by a small bespoke mapping company called Wellingtons Travel. Their idea was to produce an up-to-date map of London, featuring the latest City skyscrapers and other modern landmarks, as well as the more traditional “Ye Olde” buildings in the capital. In essence, it is a new map but with a distinctly antiquated look to it. Notable buildings are drawn in an isometric 3D style (kind of like a pretty version of the Google maps 3D building outlines) while other built-up blocks appear as hand-drawn shaded areas. Rivers and parks have similar, watercolour-style detail added to them. The Shard (which isn’t even fully built yet) appears, beside a free-floating and “steaming” HMS Belfast. The overall pastel brown, green and blue shades of the map are pleasing to the eye. Could that be ex-Mayor Boris on his bike near City Hall? The Grand Map of London (2012 edition) is a product of three years of careful work by neo-traditional mapmakers Anna Butler and Taige Zhang and covers approximately the Zone 1 area of central London. It available as a hard copy, printed on cotton canvas and presented as a scroll, in Blackwells bookshops and Stanfords, in London, as well as on the Wellingtons Travel website. There is also a free iPhone app available. Extracts reproduced with kind permission from Wellingtons...

Step aside Stephen Walter, over 270 UCL students (and staff) have created their own interactive hand drawn map of London. Organised by two students Alistair Leak and Ian Morton from the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, the map has brought out some great insights into what people think of their city. Sometimes inaccurate, frequently crude but always personal, the map could serve as an abstract and slightly whacky guide to modern day London. Highlights include Battersea Dogs Home: …the Queen Victoria Pub: …and the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs: Alistair and Ian were keen that all contributors get a mention by making sure they signed around the edges. You can see some of them in action...

We were delighted to receive a copy of this rather brilliant new map from artist Julia Forte. It highlights the sort of things in the centre of London that you wouldn’t necessarily find in a standard guide book, but might well hear about in a pub quiz. In fact the descriptions of each item, on the back of the map, are worth memorising for the next time you are in a pub quiz team! One example – the reason why a giant gleaming grasshopper is on top of the Royal Exchange at Bank is because this was the family emblem of the exchange’s founders. You can buy a copy of the map, along with lots of other interesting things – ooh, vintage tube maps 🙂 – here. Thanks very much to Julia Forte for sending in this map. Photo below by Gabrielle Ludlow on...

The above extract is an artwork from Jeremy Wood called My Ghost. Jeremy carried a GPS receiver around central London for nine years, gradually building up a “footprint” showing everywhere he went. Certain parks, such as Greenwich Park in the south-east, are distinctive by the large number of thin traces, while distinct London linear features like the River Thames and the Westway, are also clear – the former in the absence of traces and the latter showing up as a very intense line. The artwork will be appearing, with many other London-related maps, at The Art of Mapping, an exhibition curated by TAG Fine Arts in London, which will be taking place at The Air Gallery from 14-26 November. TAG Fine Arts have kindly lent me a number of images from the exhibition, from which the above is my favourite. More information about their exhibition – which will undoubtedly be a must for lovers of cartographic art and London maps – can be found on the TAG Fine Arts website. Mapping London will be visiting, not least to spot some new maps and visualisations of London for this blog! The theme of recording your life’s movements by GPS is one which we know well here at the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis. Fabian Neuhaus, a Ph.D student here, as been carrying a GPS for over three years, along with a number of friends, to collect data as part of his work. He writes a blog, UrbanTick. I’m directly involved with a similar project at a different scale, by another UCL Ph.D. I’m carrying a GPS unit 24-hours a day for the next two months, along with around 50 other volunteers. GPS tracks of central London were also instrumental in getting OpenStreetMap off the...

I’m a sucker for alternative maps of the London Underground, and here’s a great one by Francisco Dans (see the original in high-resolution on Flickr) – it’s perhaps not going to be useful to navigate by, but is a great bit of art. A recent trend of alternative maps is to show geographically accurate ones, that inevitably end up crumpling the dense centre of the network and leave huge gaps on the edges. This is a map does the opposite – it has taken the geographical deformity of the underground network map to its (il)logical extreme. The real map has never pretended to correspond to the actual locations of the stations on the surface, placing stations in roughly correct locations, but only relative to each other and not the map as a whole. This does away with that rule too. But importantly, it is a topologically accurate map – the official connections are shown correctly. Everything else is curves of various radii – only the Underground logo and the station connectors are straight lines. Francisco writes on his posting that he is looking to add in the DLR and Overground lines to a future iteration, plus fix a couple of bugs with the existing map that eagle-eyed observers have spotted. Hopefully the Thames will go in too, it’s the one non-tube feature that everyone loves. I wonder what that will end up looking like? Thanks to Francisco for permission to reproduce the map and to IanVisits on Twitter for the...

It’s a bit silly, and not exactly very helpful as a map for navigation – but it’s also a lot of fun. Brett Camper has taken the OpenStreetMap database for several cities around the world, including London, and applied a styling that is reminiscent of the blocky graphics of early-1980s computer games. As you zoom in, more detail appears, but with the same square-block style. The project is 8 Bit Cities. It’s a great example of “‘Boing Boing’ cartography” (“hey, that’s neat!”), as distinguished from machine-generated “industrial cartography” (a la Google Maps) and “artisan cartography” (hand-made historical maps), the three categories of cartography identified at a talk I was at the the Society of Cartographers Summer School last...

It’s part of human nature to see patterns where none exist. If you stare long enough at the London Underground, strange creatures might start to appear. These are the Animals on the Underground, over 30 have been “found”, there is a dedicated website to help spot them, and someone has even turned these into a book. Recent updates to the tube network might make new animals appear – the new London Overground network might allow new animals to appear, once they are discovered! The image is © copyright 2004 Grid24...

Some of the most popular posts on spatialanalysis are about typographic maps. I thought it would be cool to put together some of my favourite’s for London. Click on each image to see the source. So in no particular order here goes… Thames London Type Map London Linocut London’s Kerning ‘The Island’ London...

I wanted to steer clear of the iconic London Underground map because it is always featured on map blogs. I have already failed miserably thanks to London Peculiar posting this really great hand-drawn version. It was created in 1951 by an American in the army who clearly enjoyed joking about the English accent, beer and mocking our famous...