Considering I work in London every day as a guide, I actually get to see things that I'd like to visit myself very rarely... except of course when I get up to no good in building sites, basements and the like.
I have a huge interest and love of maps. When I was 3 or 4 years old I would sit with my Grandad with his Times Atlas of the World and we would spend hours several times a week looking at maps of our planet.
I also love old maps for their artwork and helping me make connections with the past. My Secret Gardens of the City of London book (based on what has been ranked as London #1 travel experience by a certain famous travel website and featured in the Independent) even has a cover of one of my favourite old maps of London.
Secret Gardens of the City of London Kindle Cover
Given all that and the many Maps tags on my blog posts, you'd think I'd get myself down to the Magnificent Maps of London exhibition at the London Metropolitan Archives in Clerkenwell. I've just been too busy and I thought I'd missed the boat but happily the exhibition has been extended until spring 2023.
Magnificent Maps of London brings together some of the best-known records of the capital. Following an extensive program of conservation treatment, Civitas Londinium, the first surviving map of the city will go on display at London Metropolitan Archives for the first time.
This very rare opportunity to see one of only three known copies of the map will transport visitors to the streets (and fields) of Tudor London. The exhibition will also include work by Georg Braun and Frans Hogenberg, John Rocque, John Ogilby and William Morgan, Richard Horwood, and Christopher and John Greenwood.
Early visitor guides feature alongside, tram routes, Goad's Insurance Plan, local plans and thematic surveys, including Charles Booth's map of London poverty.
Some of the maps on display will highlight the growth of London at a local level, with maps of parishes and localities, as well as the development of the capital across the Greater London area. Others will demonstrate the use of maps not just as a way of navigating the city, but also as a way of presenting information which records the experience of previous generations of Londoners, from pandemics to population studies.
One of the maps I'm most looking forward to seeing is Charles Booths Poverty Map. Charles catalogued London street by street and colour coded each one to illustrate which areas were wealthy, which were doing ok, which were poor and which were inhumanely impoverished.
There are a varieties of colours on the map generally but the darker they go, the more poverty-striken the residents are. Maps like these are incredibly important for historians looking at London. For example can it be a co-incident that Whitechapel, home of the infamous Jack The Ripper, had so many maroon and black areas?
This map above is just a tiny fragment of the London Council bomb map which illustrates the buildings damaged or destroyed by the Luftwaffe during The Blitz. For the new book I am writing on heroes memorialised in Postman's Park one of the people I often think of is a little Jewish boy named A bit of historic detective work on a young Victorian hero – Solomon Galaman whom I wrote about not too long ago.
When I was preparing to write this post, I checked out the map online and it confirmed my opinions that his house was destroyed in WW2, it is amongst those 3 purple colour properties just to the right of St. Johns Gardens.
Some of the maps are also works of art in their own right and are so detailed you can even see the heads of executed people who've had their heads put on spikes at London Bridge.
The exhibition is free so if you're in or near London do go and check it out. Hopefully I will get to go myself one da so I can see the original maps which I spend so many hours studying online.
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