Ana Kinsella - Look Here

There is very little logic to how London is laid out. You could be forgiven for getting lost. There is no grid, no structure to explain the way the streets run. Even the river coils its way through the city like an old-fashioned telephone cord. When I was very small, my family briefly lived on a quiet street perpendicular to the Thames. Kenyon Street was one of a ladder of quiet streets between the river and Fulham Palace Road, and later on my mother told me that they were known as the Alphabet Streets, their names running in alphabetical order, south to north. When I moved back to the city at twenty-two, I looked this up in my copy of the London AZ to see if it was true. From Bishops Park north to Hammersmith: Cloncurry, Doneraile, Ellerby, Finlay, Greswell, Harbord, Inglethorpe, Kenyon, Langthorne, Queensmill, Lysia, Niton. Wait, hang on a second. Where exactly did that Q come from?

Often, when navigating London, there is a sensation of the rug being pulled from under you.

Phyllis Pearsall, the painter and writer credited with creating much of Londons modern street atlas the A to Z, was familiar with the confusion of the citys streets. From a pedestrians point of view, London can be difficult to make sense of. The AZs backstory states that after getting lost on her way to a party in Belgravia in the 1930s, Pearsall, a divorcee in her late twenties and the daughter of a map-maker, took the most up-to-date London map she could find and set out to improve it.

She did this by rising every day at 5 a.m. in her bedsit near Victoria station to walk for eighteen hours, noting places of interest, house numbers, side streets and main roads. Over time, she walked 3,000 miles over 23,000 streets. The map she developed divided London into smaller, more detailed sections, making its streets easier to navigate. Pearsall established the Geographers AZ Map Company to publish her street atlas, the A to Z: Atlas and Guide to London and Suburbs with House Numbers, with its distinctive red and blue cover, and she gave the company a motto in the form of a personal maxim of hers: On we go.

Pearsalls earliest iteration of the book hit a stumbling block soon after publication: once the Second World War began, maps of such a detailed scale could no longer be sold, due to the risk of local intelligence falling into enemy hands. Pearsall passed the war working in the Ministry of Information, making maps of the frontlines of battle, eventually fracturing her spine in an air accident while bringing a shipment of maps from the Netherlands.

Since her death in 1996 there has been debate over the veracity of the origin story of Pearsalls AZ. For one thing, the map that resulted from all her walking claimed to include 9,000 more streets than any other. That was certainly a falsehood. Its a romantic idea, the image of Pearsall the footloose divorcee on her way to a party, the bohemian painter pounding pavements in a pair of sensible shoes, giving form to the chaos of Londons twisted streets and neighbourhoods as is Pearsalls fabled line of delivering early copies to W. H. Smith in a borrowed wheelbarrow. The romance of it all occludes the fact that its probable that Pearsall was a master marketer more than she was a pioneering cartographer. But the success of her work does point to an indisputable truth, that London is a labyrinth, one in need of decoding if we are to make sense of it for ourselves.

Today all of this is a little easier. Almost everyone has a map more detailed and powerful than Pearsalls AZ in their pockets, all the time. Its difficult, though not impossible, to get properly lost when you have Google Maps at your fingertips. But when I came to London as a student I didnt have a smartphone, and I moved through the city at the mercy of the countdown timer at the bus stop and my own errant sense of direction. I pinned a Tube map to the noticeboard above my desk and crossed through a stations name the first time I entered or exited it. From the very beginning, I found myself entranced by the breadth and depth of the city. Here was a thing so layered and complex that it had grown gnarled, and it was up to me to put myself inside of it. I knew that to move through it would be to move through time itself. I am the index, I thought, crossing out names on my Tube map. On we go.