Tubermap is an extremely easy and quick way to find the fastest route between any two stations the TfL tube/train networks in London (London Underground, London Overground, DLR, London Tram, TfL Rail and Cable Car). Just click your start and end station, and the fastest route is instantly shown, along with transfer stations and the contactless price. Tubermap uses a modified form of the classic “Tube map” network diagram – just different enough to stand apart from TfL’s own version, but incorporating the famous 45-degree bends, Zone 1 area exaggeration and straight lines out in the suburbs: It’s a great example of a clean map and easy-to-use website hiding a complex routing system. It’s entirely powered by Javascript, with the calculations being done locally by your browser. By clicking Options you can adjust the map to show a heat-map background of times to every station from your currently selected one, and you can even miss out Zone 1 and see how the network, routing and timings change: Tubermap is brand new and in active development, with a mobile-friendly version having recently gone live – and lots of other things in the pipeline. One to keep an eye on. Try it...

Mapping London’s co-founder and “Editor at Large” Dr James Cheshire co-produced “London: The Information Capital” with Oliver Uberti in 2014. We mentioned the book on its initial release. The book has this month has now been published in a softback edition by Penguin, with some minor corrections applied. If you missed out on the book the first time, this is therefore an ideal opportunity to pick it up (e.g. here on Amazon) at a new, low price. The book, containing over 100 data maps and graphics, visualises London, its people and its data. The book runs to nearly 200 pages and every map style is different – many techniques have been employed, each aiming to best show its dataset in an original and eye-catching way. Some of my favourites are: Islington has Issues. This graphic (above, also see full online version) uses glyphs to represent each borough as a face, with the mouth, eyes, eyebrows, perspiration and general “glow” varying according to four measures of well-being. The graphic is also a map – the glyphs are arranged in three concentric circles, the innermost being an average and the middle and outer rings representing inner and outer London respectively. The boroughs are arranged approximately relative to each other in geographical space. This technique has been used in hexagonal and square forms before and I think it’s an effective way of simplifying borough boundaries (which are largely unfamiliar to most people) while preserving borough separations to show a changing picture across the capital. A single futher glyph represents the rest of the UK, showing that Londoners are generally unhappier than most. Top Crimes. The Met Police release the approximate locations and category of all crime reports in London. Crunching this data can derive information showing the...

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

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

Just in time for Hallowe’en comes Grim London, a spooky and atmospheric map of central London. Navigate around the bleak, faded map of the city you thought you knew, then type in a postcode (try WC1E 6BT) or a borough name. This loads a number of Maltese crosses for the local area – clicking on these reveals the grim history of that place. This is really well themed data map by creative agency Impero, great to see this new and impressive piece of cartography, with a suitably restrained colour palette and a Rustic fonts, faded tube roundels, and occasional missing sections of streets, add to the cognitive dissonance of the map, while WebGL fog swirls across the browser. Click the lamp and find out the scary stories local to your neighborhood. Visit the map...

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...

Time Out London, the venerable London free magazine, have spotted that everyone in London loves maps, and so have launched a regular London Mapped feature in their City Life section & blog. This week’s map is rather interesting and not one I’ve seen before. It shows ONS 2015 data on net migration between each of London’s boroughs and the rest of the UK – so it includes cross-borough moves within London (which typically radiate outwards from Zone 1 to 6 as people age) but doesn’t include international migration (which tends to come straight in to Zones 2 to 3). Instead, it looks at the migration that happens when Londoners form families and need a bigger space than they can afford in their local borough or pensioners that yearn for the seaside or a quieter part of London (e.g. the east and south-west boroughs) or somewhere else in the UK, balanced against a steady, but often temporary, move to the universities and graduate opportunities in the capital. The key statistic is an overall outflow (domestically) seen in London’s population. London in general is increasing in population, but this is mainly due to a combination of births and inwards international migration (and in particular, the high birth rate of international immigrants.) By removing these particular population sources and flows, London suffers just under a 1% population decrease from 2014 to 2015 – a lesser reported statistic in between the headlines that London’s total population has recently hit an all-time high. We like the simple, blocky style, which approximately retains the shape of the 32 boroughs (+ the City of London), so is a hybrid of a pure squares approach and a regular geographic data map. Bravely, the creator omits the River Thames, and also leaves out...

This map shows the cross-borough London commuting flows in a different way to the conventional approach of drawing lines between the start and end of each commute (as shown here. It’s a large map of London boroughs, which each borough itself containing a small map of London. The intensity of the colour in each of these mini-maps shows the size of the flow from the origin borough (on the big map) to the destination borough (in the small map). Once you get your head around it, it’s a powerful and simple way to show a complex dataset. The simple grey, white and red colours reduce the clutter of the map (although personally I would have added a River Thames link through the main map and mini maps, for clarity) and, as long as you are familiar with London’s boroughs and their approximate location relative to each other, studying the map allows some interesting results to appear that would otherwise be hidden if just using lines. For example, in the affluent boroughs to the south west, most commute flow seems to either remain within the borough itself, or to the centre of London. In the poorer north east boroughs, the pattern is different with a strong additional commute flow to intermediate boroughs, as well as the local and central-London flows. This is likely caused by the different location and nature of jobs performed by residents in these respective borough groups. This technique of nested maps to show flows was developed at the giCentre at City University London. The map was created by Robert Radburn and he explains in detail its creation, along with an interactive allowing the display of different types of commutes, in this blog post. Via a...

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...

The tube map is a useful base for data maps of London, because most people (north of the river, at least) tend to think of the city’s layout in terms of the tube map – generally, you know what your nearest tube station is. We’ve used the idea before to show maps of life expectancy, jobs and local languages, but TotallyMoney have taken the idea for one of London’s most discussed metrics – the cost of property in the capital. There’s been a few property price/tube mashup maps that have crossed the Mapping London desk over the years, but we particularly like this one because rather than using the official map (which TfL get upset about, and can be hard to work with), or a geographic map (which is less recognisable, if more representative) it uses a hybrid, custom-created map which is recognisable enough as the tube map but has a design which works well in showing the data. We particularly like the ribbon-like, always-important River Thames which flows organically through the map. The creators have also been careful to make clear what they are showing – it is the average price per square foot of properties for sales within half a kilometre of each of the tube stations, based on data from Zoopla on 1 May 2016. In some cases this may only be a small number of properties (and Heathrow is removed altogether as there are obviously no sales there!) but the variations as you travel along tube lines are relatively smooth, suggesting the measure is accurate and useful. Values range from £300 around Dagenham, in the east, to Knightsbridge, in central/west London – the latter being handy for Halfords but a property would set you back £2000 per square foot. A...

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...

Alexander Brett has created this interactive map of London using the D3 visualisation framework and its “Force Layout” view. This places the data points (London ward centroids) at their geographic origin, and then applies a series of competing forces, as if the points are connected by a mesh of springs, to subtly adjust the locations based on the data value. Alex has seeded the map with a number of socioeconomic datasets from the London Datastore. You can set two variables – one, a list of categorical measures, controls the colours, and the other, a list of qualitative measures, controls the area sizes. You then sit back and let the code do its magic, as the map warps and the circles grow and shift into their new data values. The technique is both clever and simple at the same time – it’s a neat bit of D3.js programming, and the results are easy to interpret and navigate. It reminds me of the After the Flood cartograms, although it’s more geographically accurate. I’ve tried a similar technique for my London Election map although I’ve not allowed my circles to ebb and flow based on the data, so my data can overlap or leave empty spaces. The code is open source so it should be straightforward for the community to adopt and enhance it. I would love to see the London Datastore use this as a “default” visualisation of their ward and borough level datasets. While a map with regular geographical features certainly has its place, sometimes stripping nearly everything away can be just as clear and informative. Above – crime rate for each London ward, based on crimes per resident population, 2014/15, Met Police area only. Each borough is coloured different. Westminster in the centre stands...

Network Rail, who own most of London’s “heavy rail” track, have created this graphic showing where in London they are improving the rail network (short answer: most of it). The graphic is part of an interactive that you can view here. It’s slightly buggy and a few years out of date (e.g. no Lea Bridge station, Overground expansion or Reading Crossrail extension) and has some spelling mistakes (Bushey Park?) but does still contain most of the recent and current work going on. The map is presented in isometric form – there are relatively few examples of this type of map for London – and includes a number of landmarks (although one has a topological error – can you spot it?) We like the 3D “orange army” rail workers wielding mallets, holding maps and pointing at things around the worksites. There is no key but I think orange lines are ones being upgraded or built, with blue ones being the existing network. Crossrail is the orange dotted line running right across the map, free of the blue lines (existing track) for most of its length. The map perhaps looks particularly odd because it’s an network map of London that doesn’t include any tube (or DLR) lines, except in the few cases where they run on National Rail track (e.g. District line near Richmond). As such, it looks surprisingly odd and unfamiliar. In London, we’re so familiar with seeing the tube map that it’s actually quite difficult to navigate another network map that doesn’t include it. At least the River Thames is there as a navigational backup. So while the data on the map is far from perfect, the map style is nice and provides a fresh way of looking at the capital. This type of...

Following on from their Brutalist London Map, Blue Crow Media have moved back a few decades and produced this new map of Art Deco London. The map is presented in an attractive slip and folds out to A2. It’s printed on silver paper, which gives the roads and rivers a lovely, sparkly sheen to them. As well as the silver background, the colours used (black, with white station symbols and dark green parks) gives the map a rather unique feel. The map reveals the locations of London’s key Art Deco (1920s-40s) buildings, in red. Art Deco buildings come both the imposing and the delicate. Former examples include Senate House, the chunky building that is the University of London library (and allegedly was going to be the UK HQ for the Germans if they had won the Battle of Britain), and the London Underground HQ at 55 Broadway, which sits above St James’ Park station. More delicate buildings include the gorgeous former Daily Express building on Fleet Street (which has this amazing staircase), and the equally curvy Florin Court in Charterhouse. Oxo Tower is there. Famously, the chimney had windows shaped as “O”, “X”, and “O”, to get around strict advertising regulations of the time. Plus Battersea Power Station also gets a mention, even if it is (temporarily) without its iconic towers. The reverse of the map includes a complete list of the buildings that are highlighted on the map, including the designer, build year and listing status. We really like the silvery background paper which makes the map stand out and gives it a bit of style. The guide is ideal for an art-deco tour of London and will almost certainly reveal interesting buildings you haven’t spotted before, even if you know London well...

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...

The tube map is almost certainly London’s most widely produced and collected map, with many millions of the pocket version being issued for free every year by TfL from London’s 270+ tube stations. But how about having one that’s made of steel? Well, now you can thanks to Suck UK, who have produced an officially licensed, photographically etched version of the famous tube map for central London, on a credit card-sized sheet of highly polished stainless steel. The product is very thin – about half the width of a credit card, but, being steel, is of course very strong. It fits very nicely in your wallet, and as a bonus acts as a signal barrier, stopping your contactless cards from accidentally being used or suffering “card clash” at barriers. In order for this to work, they need to be lined up with it, and right beside it. One additional “extra” is that the reverse side is completely blank and, being highly polished, acts as a good mirror. The map itself is a variant of the TfL Version M black and white map. The normal line colours are replaced with patterns of dots and dashes. The map includes a small key at the bottom left. Purists will spot that the map doesn’t quite perfectly match the current one – it doesn’t show the extended Circle line going out west to Paddington, or the Overground lines (except for around Canonbury) – but then, they aren’t really tube lines anyway. It also does only show Zone 1 – essentially, the complicated section within central London for which such a map is actually very useful. Buy it for £6.50 including P&P from Suck UK on Amazon. It’s also available from the Transport Museum shop in Covent Garden. Thanks...

This is one of the many data visualisation and design postcards that Stefanie Posavec and Georgia Lupi sent each other of the course of a year. It’s a personal map of Stefanie’s London history – where she lived, studied and worked, her main commute and other routes. Everyone living in London will build up a map like this – in their head. Stefanie drew hers. Stefanie is giving a talk about the Dear Data project that she and Georgia created, at the St Bride Foundation on Fleet Street on 26 April. See here for more information about the talk. Copyright Stefanie Posavec. Many thanks to the St Bride’s Foundation for inviting me to the...

The Shard, London’s tallest building, has a viewing platform at the top, the The View from the Shard. To access the platform, you use two lifts, the first from the 1st to the 33rd floor and then a second lift from the 33rd to 68th floor. The viewing galleries are then on the 69th floor (inside) and 72nd floor (outside), above which the Shard continues to taper to the 87th floor. Transferring between the two lifts, visitors walk over a large map that covers the floor and walls of the sky lobby there. The Shard themselves describe the map as a “graffiti word map” but I would consider it a nicely designed typographic map, that is, a word-based respresentation of the capital. The location of the Shard itself is shown as a discrete red dot, the rest of the map being made of of main roads, the River Thames, and two hundred sentences, that “flow” through rather nicely through the gaps between the mapped roads. The map is arranged around a corner, and carries on up on the walls too, so forming a rather unconventional way of looking at London’s layout – rather like the viewpoint itself. Each sentence is a description of a well known local feature of the area, without naming the feature itself, so providing teasers for visitors waiting for the next lift. For example, “Where houses line up like a slices in a toast rack”, corresponds to the Toast Rack area of Wandsworth – I must confess I’d not heard of this one before! The River Thames itself remains on the floor part of the map and so provides the focal feature for the visitors to walk along to get to the next lift. The corner of the route corresponds...

As an update to our previous feature on a replica map set of the John Rocque eighteenth century map of London, we feature the Locating London’s Past project. At the heart of the website is a high-resolution scanned version of the aforementioned historic map, allowing anyone to see this 260 270-year-old snapshot of (central) London in wonderful detail, including the individual alleyways and yards (with names clearly visible) linking the medieval street network. The project has “orthorectified” the old map, lining it up with the modern “Google Map” which is also available from a drop down on the website for a direct comparison. Interested researchers can add pins to the map referencing various historic records, such as plague deaths and Old Bailey proceedings, via the Data tab. 1740s London looks distinctly different – it’s much smaller, of course, and while the familiar street pattern is familiar in many places, there are some big changes too. One of the most striking differences is the lack of the Embankment road (for example, in the snapshot below). Instead, streets and yards just lead straight down to the edge of the River Thames, often ending at a flight of stairs down to the water itself. Most of these have disappeared now, the building of the Embankment and modern bridges across the Thames having put paid to that, although some are still intact, including a rather spectacular set accessible just east of Tower Bridge – the Horsleydown Old Stairs, which appear on the map too. University College London was still 80 years off being founded when this map was produced, and the area is shown simply as some small garden plots off Tottenham Court Road and the “Road to Highgate”. Spellings have changed – back then it was “High...

Here’s an attractive map commissioned by The Watch Gallery to highlight some of the key places in London, in the development of timekeeping. From the Old Observatory at Greenwich, to Big Ben, there are many horologically significant places featured here, including some recent location such as the Swiss clock installed in Borough Market to commemorate the Swiss pavilion for the Olympic Games in 2012. The map is appropriately called Winding Streets. It’s nice to see a dedicated map like this, rather than a common (but lazy) way of mapping a particular topic by sticking pins on the default render of Google Maps. A particularly nice touch is the treatment of the parks in a watercolour style, and little features drawn in with a pen stroke, such as Westminster Bridge and fish in the River Thames. Not too much to overwhelm and distract, just the right amount to add character to a map that is telling a story. See a zoomable version of the map here. Thanks to The Watch Gallery for the...

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

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...

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

So London’s myriad of suburban commuter rail services, many of which are south of the River Thames and so act as the equivalent of the largely north-of-the-river tube network, may in the future come under the control of Transport for London, the main transit authority for the city. It makes a lot of sense – TfL’s Overground network has already reinvigorated many old and unloved commuter rail lines in the last few years. It has however added a lot of orange to the tube map and if more lines come under TfL’s command (albeit continuing to be operated by private companies and with the track continuing to be owned by Network Rail) then the tube map is going to turn into a real mess. The London Connections map which includes the commuter rail, already is hard to read with its wiggles and dashes, and that’s without turning it orange. Step forward architect and transit cartographer Jug Cerovic who has mapped many metro networks around the world, and has come up with a lovely map of the London system that manages to combine the tube and commuter rail networks into a single map that is clear and pleasant to read, unlike the official ones. The INAT London Metro Map is a lesson in simplifying and making attractive a complex topological map. A key decision decision shows the commuter rail in varied pastel colours – much better than the visually noisy dashed lines on the official map, or an orange apocalypse. The map abounds with other visual pleasantries, such as zone indicators shown beside each station, rather than as arbitrarily shaped and ugly blobs of grey. Key walking links are shown with walking symbols – fancy that! – and stations with multiple lines are shown generally...

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

SmellyMaps reveals the “olfactory footprint of London” – the streets which are dominated by traffic fumes, the animal smells emanating out from London Zoo, and the influence of parks and greenspaces on London’s scent experience. Streets are measured for four smell groupings based on tags from Flickr photos calibrated from a smell taxonomy: emissions (coloured red on the map), nature (green), food (blue) and animals (yellow), the map colouring each road by the most dominant of the four. Clicking on the segment reveals the measurements. The results are attractively presented on a background map. SmellyMaps is an output from Bell Labs’ Daniele Quercia, based partly on many urban walks and surveys by RCA student Kate McLean, which created the smell taxonomy from which the Flickr and other social media data was categorised, creating the final map. I wonder how big the smell footprint from the Lush cosmetic shops extends? See the interactive map here. From a presentation by...

To celebrate one year since the release of London: The Information Capital by Mapping London co-editor James Cheshire and graphic designer Oliver Uberti, and the book recently winning the BCS Award, the authors have released a number of new excepts from the book. Here we feature “What Lies Beneath”, a map of the tunnelled sections of the forthcoming (2018+) Crossrail line that snakes right through central London. During the archaeological surveys that took place prior to excavating the tunnels, a wide variety of historic artefacts were found, some of which are celebrated in this graphic in the book, along with a map of the route itself and a cross-section of key buildings the line will pass by. From plague skeletons to woolly mammoths, The cartography of the map is very pleasing to the eye, it combines the characteristic “sketch style”, with both the artefacts and the rail and river lines appearing as “pencil strokes”, but forming proper geographic map accurately showing the route. You can, by the way, see how Crossrail will mesh with the existing TfL routes in London on this interactive map (the line line is in purple on this latter map). You can buy the book on Amazon. See also our previous feature on the official Crossrail tunnel map. Sketches by Oliver Uberti with data from...

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...

For fans all all things concrete comes this map of London’s most famous Brutalist buildings. Created by Blue Crow Media (see also their craft beer and cycling maps, it is the first in a new series of map-based guides to London architecture, focusing on the modern 1950s/60s “raw” concrete-heavy designs by Le Corbusier and others of the post-war architectural phase. The map is presented attractively in a blue band which keeps it nicely folded. The font used for the map title and building captions is the classic Helvetica font, used most famously on the New York Subway signs, crops up in all kinds of modern design institutions and is entirely appropriate here. On the reverse of the map, once unfolded, there is a short section on each of the structures featured on the map, with a photo, address, designer, build date and listing info. Blue Crow Media have created a soothing, subdued background map of concrete greys, browns and pale blues, using OpenStreetMap data. They have eschewed road names, featuring instead tube and railway stations, denoted (perhaps controversially) by roundels, as the chief geographic landmarking for the map, along with park names. It’s a bold idea but works well here with the partially translucent red for the Brutalist building outlines standing out strongly. If the Barbican Estate is one of your favourite London places, then this is the map to get to further explore these striking, if divisive, buildings. Buy the map from the Blue Crow Media shop Thanks to Blue Crow Media for the review...

Today, the London Transport Museum unveils a new permanent gallery in its space in Covent Garden, called “London by Design“. The gallery includes a number of maps which have not been exhibited before, including this lovely map of the “Baker Street & Waterloo Railway (of which the Bakerloo Line‘s name is a portmanteau) which first started running in 1906, between Baker Street and Waterloo. The map is a geographical one with the tube network added on to it (Beck’s non-geographic diagrams were still 25 years away) and it was likely intended to show just how useful the new link was, allowing access between north and south central London without having to go east to Farringdon or west to Kensington (operated presumably by rival train companies). I like the cartography of this map – or, at least, of the underlying map by “Johnson, Riddle, Couchman & Co Ltd of Southwark. The colours are nice and simple – yellow urban areas, red key buildings, black stations and blue water features. London’s geography seems surprisingly familiar, 100+ years later. The parks and urban areas have generally not changed name. The railway networks themselves are perhaps what has changed significantly. I never knew for instance that Angel was once a terminus station. Bricklayers Arms station is one that has vanished completely off the network maps. Lots Road, the old power station that powered the tube network, appears on the map at the bottom. Of interest is how the Bakerloo route then added on top in a translucent manner, showing how closely it follows the road network above it, suggesting that it is the obvious alternative to a walk along Portland Place, Regent Street and Haymarket. The original cartographers (not the Bakerloo ones!) have taken care to place their...

This “line” map of Camden’s cultural locations – museums, galleries and music venues – has been produced by Camden Council and appears alongside a “Legible London” map of the borough and surrounding areas. I like the concept of simplifying a normal 2D right down to a straight line (although the actual route itself does involve a number of turns that the map doesn’t hint at) to simplify and filter London’s dense network of attractions and places of interest into a straightforward narrative. Segment walking time indicators and tube stations help to break the line up into easy sections. The idea is simple and compelling, it is perhaps all you need to spend a day in London as a tourist (with the regular map to look at as a useful backup or for more detail). Each of the cultural locations are represented as a circle, the colour of the circle and inner symbol showing the location type. The use of straight lines and circles is reminiscent of a tube map, with the “stations” along the line (and branches off it) being the cultural attractions. The idea could easily be extended to cover over popular London tourist/cultural areas, such as along the South Bank/Bankside or through Strand/Fleet Street/the City. I spotted the map in the Wellcome Collection, one of the museums included along the line. It’s available from the front desk, as a sheet from a tear-off pad. The map is produced by the London Borough of Camden Creative Services/Arts and Tourism...

Londoners: The Board Game is a concept for a London-focused Risk-style game, currently being crowdfunded on Kickstarter by “Stef and Ollie” (no relation!) We like this because the game is focused around a map of London. The definition of London for the game unusually uses the M25 “ring” as the border, which means Watford and Staines get included. It is also necessarily simplified, splitting London into six sectors radiating around the centre. There are also some topological quirks, but to complain about these would be missing the point – this is all about fitting London into a Risk-style conquest! We really like the bright colours used in the map – they correspond loosely to the tube lines dominant in each area (which is why, for example, the northern sector is black). It is also good to see the inclusion of the River Thames and the M25 as the key contextual features. As well as the main game, which involves missions for your character, such as buying up the football stadiums or the City, the area cards that will come with the board can make a mini “top trumps” style game. Trade cards on factors such as house prices and “coolness”. The team have already hit their funding target but are accepting overfunding – you can contribute in the next few days to secure your copy, your name on the board or other perks. If all goes well then it should be out in January next year. Crowdfunding page with more details on the project. Thanks to Stefan for letting us know about the...

Is this London’s first 3D map? The vivid and historic map of London in 1842, coloured by district, has one unusual feature – it’s embossed. The photos here (taken of the copy in The Map House dealership in Knightsbridge) are from the framed copy that hangs in The Map House and the directional lighting from above picks out the relief of the buildings. This must therefore make it one of London’s earliest “3D” maps, and the embossed effect, even if it is uniformly applied to each building and so does not correspond to the actual heights or height differences, helps emphasise that, even in the mid-nineteenth century, London was already a very large place. It was a particularly interesting stage in London’s development. UCL had just appeared, then much smaller and simply called “London University” (N.B. misnamed on the map, as it had actually changed its name to University College, London, a few years earlier). The railways were just arriving, the railway companies punching through the surburbs to as close to the centre as they could, and building great terminii stations. London Bridge, Paddington and Fenchurch Street had made it, but King’s Cross and St Pancras hadn’t and the area where they now are is shown as a simple set of residential streets. The original was folded up into panelled sheets but it is displayed here in its folded out, and framed, glory. The changes of colour for each district make the map a surprisingly lively affair considering its age – the bright colours might not be for everyone but it’s certainly a piece that draws the eye. The map is out of copyright and various editions appear online – but be aware that these are simply lithographic creations – they may reproduce the...

London has a lot of history, of course, and a lot of blue plaques have been erected by English Heritage over the years to mark the locations of its famous people and deeds from times past. Local history societies and borough councils have also added their own plaques, of various colours, so that some parts of London (for example, Bloomsbury with its academic tradition) is a rich source of blue plaques, some rows of houses having several plaques along their length, occasionally even beside neighbouring doorways. Open Plaques is gradually assembling a user-contributed database of plaques from across London, the UK and indeed the world, and there are numerous other projects and books on the subject. One of these, The London Blue Plaque Guide, written by Nick Rennison, is now in its fourth edition, as it attempts to keep up to date both with new plaques being added, but also existing ones disappearing and sometimes even relocating. If you are on a plaque-spotting trip to a London neighbourhood, or simply want to know about the plaques are nearest to you (and exactly where they are) then the London Blue Plaque Guide, coming in at over 300 pages, is an appropriately authoritative guide. The plaques are presented in alphabetical order based on the surname of the person featured, each plaque gets roughly a quarter of a page (there are nearly 1000 in London), detailing the name, inscription on the plaque, and – in almost all cases except for the very obscure – a paragraph serving as a concise obituary of the person concerned. This provides the context and detail behind the plaques, which themselves are typically a maximum of 10 words. The equivalents in other countries, such as the National Historic Landmark signs in the...

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,...

[Updated – Thanks to this blog post, this map is now officially on the TfL website – read on!] The Transport for London (TfL) tube map, with its straight lines, 45-degree rounded corners and simple, clear cartography, is a design classic. The map dispenses with other features such as parks, roads and urban extents – because you don’t need those if you are getting from A to B on the tube network. Similarly, real-life wiggles and curves on the network are straightened – they’re not important, because they don’t affect your journey. It also means the complex central section can be shown at a larger scale than the rest of the network, while still connected to it. The London Rail & Tube services map extends the concept to show all London railways in the same way, the increased complexity making it a bit harder to read, but still adhering to the same design principles. But did you know that TfL produce another version of the map – one where roads, parks and neighbourhoods are included? One which shows the real-life wiggles of the network, and where distances between links can be directly compared, and journey lengths estimated? (Chalfont & Latimer to Chesham is actually a journey of several kilometres, but looks shorter than a 200m one-stop journey in central London, on the regular map.) It’s the TfL London Connections map and it’s not made generally available to the public, however this Freedom of Information request reveals its existence. While I can understand TfL’s reluctance to crowd the public narrative with multiple, different looking maps of its network, it’s a shame that this one is accordingly given a relatively low profile, as it’s really rather nice, combining a level of geographical utility (with the major...

Several years ago, we featured some striking maps from a small exhibition at the London Metropolitan Archive. Each map was a detailed plan of a small part of London, the basemap being from 1916, with individual houses clearly shown. Many houses were just shown in white, but a number were coloured in various colours – showing which houses had been hit by bombs during the London Blitz in the Second World War, and the level of damage. Additionally, circles show the impact locations of V1 and V2 rockets. The maps were annotated with the damage/impact information by the London County Council, the city’s public authority at the time, shortly after the war finished, as a visual record of the extend and severity of the damage. The concept of colour coding individual houses based on an observed attribute is reminiscent of the famous Booth poverty maps, completed 70 years before, although of course recording a very different attribute. The yellow/orange/red/purple/black colour ramping used is clear and vivid. Previously, you needed to visit the archive yourself and make an appointment to see the maps, but now, Laurence Ward, Principle Archivist of the London Metropolitan Archive, has taken these maps, professionally photo-reproduced them and included all 110 in this beautifully presented, large-format hardback book “The London County Council: Bomb Damage Maps 1939-1945“, which is published by Thames & Hudson this week, to mark the 75th anniversary of the first German air raids in London in September 1940. The first thing that strikes you on opening the book is its size. It’s a weighty tome, containing the maps scanned at high resolution and reproduced in full colour, most across two pages and so presented approximately in A3 – large enough to see the individual house classifications clearly. It...

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...

This lovely map, drawn isometrically with individual building detail, was created by Oxford Cartographers for Southeastern Railway back in 2006 as a weekend/tourist map, which is why the full map (below) prominently features London Bridge, Waterloo East and Charing Cross stations, and highlights tourist attractions in the vicinity of these stations only. Ignoring these specific modifications, the underlying map is really very attractive. Although the map is 9 years old and London is an evolving city, it is probably still perfectly valid as a tourist map today. The map has a nice perspective trick – although the buildings appear to be in 3D, and the map appears to be a birds-eye view angled, from the south, it is drawn with slightly larger roads and smaller buildings than in real life, such that the building detail doesn’t obscure the road network, making it still very navigable. A high density of street names also helps with the navigation. Although this style of map is quite a traditional approach, and “Walkable Streets”-type maps, aka Legible London, are becoming quite fashionable now (Oxford Cartographers are also involved with these styles), there is still a certain charm in this kind of map which makes noisy, grimy central London look, well, rather pleasant. Frustratingly I couldn’t find anything on the web about this map so I’ve scanned it in and reproduced it in full below (low quality) with a higher resolution detail above. Copyright Oxford Cartographers...

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...

Transport for London are introducing an all-night service for parts of the London Underground, for Friday and Saturday nights from September. They have today unveiled the official map for the service, showing which bits of which lines will run all night, with trains running every 10-20 minutes. The Night Tube will most benefit people getting back to outer London after a night out, replacing slow and tedious night bus services a fast and efficient underground service – Morden suddenly looks a lot closer to Central. It will also be useful for those with jobs requiring early starts on Saturday and Sunday mornings, such as Heathrow Airport workers. TfL is aiming to add more parts of the Underground network, as well as the DLR and London Overground, in years to come. TfL have decided not to change the basic design of its famous Beck-legacy tube map for the night edition. The zone areas remain, even those for Zones 7-9, even though there are no night tube lines that go that far in the initial service. The River Thames remains as the standard reference point. The background is made up of shades of blue, rather than the normal white, or the black background that perhaps have been the alternative choice. Station names are in white and the lines themselves are enclosed in white buffers (aka halos) to make them stand out. The buffers and the white-on-blue text is somewhat less legible at a distance (see the small picture of the full map, below) but clear to read as normal, when viewed close up (as in the excerpt above). More fundamentally the idea of producing and prominently displaying a dedicated tube map for the night service, while having the other alternative networks (e.g. the step-free access network)...

London has some grand gardens, many open to the public, and often with a special map to help with their exploration. Here are some of the maps of London’s greatest public gardens. 1. Kew Gardens This attractive map (see top) gives a good view of Kew’s huge extent (especially as it includes a key) and makes good use of captions. The famous vistas in the gardens are included, although they are quite difficult to pick out. A more detailed map which revealed more about the plants of each area, would have be nice. 2. Kensington Gardens One of London’s Royal Parks, and ajoined to Hyde Park, Kensington Gardens is large, ornamental, and free to access. Much of it is more park-like than garden-like, although it does have some formal areas. Its map does a reasonable job of picking out key statues and other features of the gardens, as well as clearly showing public transport around the edges. Curiously it is not shown as a top-down map, but tilted, as if the view was looking from the air, to the south. Therefore, distances are a little harder to understand, and there is no key, apart from a “walking time” bar – which, due to the aforementioned tilt, would be different depending on the direction. Still, it is a pretty map and emphasises the lovely green oasis in central London: 3. The Gardens of the City of London The City is the square mile that lies right at the heart of the metropolis, and its council, the City of London Corporation, have produced this useful map of the many public green spaces throughout the area, many of which are popular lunchtime retreats for the 250000+ city worker who cram into the area. The map is not...