London Maps
Dec. 5th, 2006 02:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
major_clangerA few weeks ago I was browsing a newspaper online and saw a preview feature on a forthcoming exhibition at the British Library - London: A Life In Maps. As a London-loving cartophile, I marked it down at once as something to visit when I was back in the UK. Sure enough, last Friday it was my first stop after arriving at King's Cross.
I have to say it lived up to my every expectation, and then some. London is a city so steeped in history that walking through a collection of maps is like peeling layers off an onion, seeing how familiar areas were once villages or farmland. Looking back at a map from the 17th or 18th century somehow makes history or fiction set in those periods seem much more real. And it is not just purely navigational maps that do this; the exhibition also features land-title maps (including one covered with notes by a vexed lawyer trying to disentangle the ownership of what would become the Grosvenor Estate), maps showing land use, ethnicity and poverty, and of course some of the famous maps plotting the spread of cholera.
What felt like a brief walk through the exhibition took me an hour and a half, and seeing as how it's on until March I fully expect to go back for more. In the mean time I can thoroughly recommend it to anyone who shares my interests in London and its history, or in maps and diagrams.
I have to say it lived up to my every expectation, and then some. London is a city so steeped in history that walking through a collection of maps is like peeling layers off an onion, seeing how familiar areas were once villages or farmland. Looking back at a map from the 17th or 18th century somehow makes history or fiction set in those periods seem much more real. And it is not just purely navigational maps that do this; the exhibition also features land-title maps (including one covered with notes by a vexed lawyer trying to disentangle the ownership of what would become the Grosvenor Estate), maps showing land use, ethnicity and poverty, and of course some of the famous maps plotting the spread of cholera.
What felt like a brief walk through the exhibition took me an hour and a half, and seeing as how it's on until March I fully expect to go back for more. In the mean time I can thoroughly recommend it to anyone who shares my interests in London and its history, or in maps and diagrams.
