Mrs P's Journey

by Sarah Hartley

  ‘This just will not do.’

  She knew what Sandor would have done. She also knew that her mother would have laughed and said, ‘You show your father, darling. Just you show him what you can do, and beat him at his own silly game.’

  ‘Papa? It’s me, Phyllis.’

  ‘It must be rather late there.’

  ‘Midnight. Look – I want to do a street map – of London. There aren’t any decent ones, you see. I don’t know the place and I keep getting lost, so what everybody else does I have no idea. There’s a terrible gap in the market, and I want to fill it – for you, Papa, and for Geographia. What do you think?’

  ‘It’s a brilliant idea. But, you foolish child – have you any idea how on earth you would go about it? Leave it to the professionals, leave it to me. I’ll see to it that one of my old draughtsmen gets to it straight away. We’ve got a nice little money-earner here.’

  ‘No, Papa. I want to do it.’

  ‘I give you a week, before you throw in the towel.’

  ‘I think it will take me a year and I’ll finish the job.’

  ‘I’m counting . . .’

  And with that Sandor Gross hung up on his daughter.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  The Scribes and the Fallacies

  ‘Maps are of primary importance because they visualise the mentalities of past ages. They are all subjective. All maps lie.’

  Peter Barber, Deputy Librarian, the British Map Library

  A blind woman. That is how, for the most part, Phyllis felt as she undertook the mighty and self-imposed task to map London. Blind because, unlike in Paris, she did not have a feel for the city; its shape, its texture or its size. Blind because she had not seen the movement or the workings of the capital for more than a few months. Blind because she had never heard any voices from the city’s past, listened to their stories or grasped more than snatches of history.

  Her journey would take her over land, by then covered in tarmac and concrete, but underneath encrusted with sliver after sliver of past lives, from AD 50 when the Romans proclaimed it Londinium, capital of Britannia Superior, right up towards the close of the twentieth century, when it would be dubbed the capital of Cool Britannia.

  The Romans had constructed a city that was simple to walk around and simple to map. With its neat white, timber-framed houses, laid out uniformly in strong, straight lines from the River Thames to surround a forum and basilica (town hall and law courts), the roads were easy to learn. A long wall flanked the entire city, with six gates used for entering from the west to the east. Their names are still current today: Ludgate, Newgate, Aldersgate, Cripplegate, Bishopsgate and Aldgate.

  Phyllis had missed the days of horses grazing in Mayfair, the gallows swinging at Tyburn, the windmill of Windmill Street or the hawthorn bushes tucked around the fields since replaced by Trafalgar Square. She knew little about the expansion of the maturing city, that fluctuated with prosperity, from evolution to revolution, thousands and thousands of times over, like a mutant cell under a microscope.

  The inhabitants had suffered from its violent metamorphoses too – even disappearing from the pages of history between AD 457–604, after a Viking invasion that would be named The Great Slaughter. Yet over the months, years and centuries, a stronger city emerged, bearing the scars as a triumphant symbol of its painful past.

  Many parts of London are as breathtakingly beautiful as any rural vista, yet the landscape of London was not created through natural means. Instead, its unique face has been created by artifice; vast sums of money have been spent over thousands of years in an attempt to improve on the mismatched looks inherited from previous generations.

  Today in London, 34,000 Listed buildings stand defiantly, waiting for the cruel erosion of time and pollution to scratch away at their fragile foundations, until they, too, disappear. Others have been forced out. Marking their passage in history, street-names are the sole reminders of the busy trades that once thrived in close-knit communities; names like Silk Mills Path, Carpenters Mews, Ironmonger Row, Saddlers Mews, Slippers Place, Smithy Street.

  Some buildings though, have clung to their birthplace. A Victorian church backs on to a Georgian house, which backs on to a 1970s flat-roofed clothes shop, which faces a minimalist glass-fronted Japanese noodle bar, which lies within earshot of an Edwardian railway line. Every cobbled street, monument, bridge and park, has been planned and built at some point in the past millennium, and with each new construction, the fattening capital spreads its arms a little wider.

  At the last count, London sprawls across 610 square miles, heaving under the weight of around 8 million people, 3 million cars and provides sustenance for an estimated 16 million rats.

  Yet for nearly 75 per cent of the city’s existence, there have never been accurate cartographic records kept. The earliest surviving map depicts London in 1558, during the first year of Queen Elizabeth I’s reign. With a mere 90,000 inhabitants, it appears nothing more than a large town, surrounded by the countryside of Spital Fields to the east and St Giles in the Field to the west. The scale is strangely askew. The boats on the river are the same size as a street, while the Tower of London, complete with water-filled moat, appears insignificant by comparison. Unsigned, the hand-coloured map is thought to be the work of Dutch engraver Frans Hogenberg and likely to have been based on a drawing by George Hoefnagel.

  Considering that, for the most part, early cartographers produced maps from an aerial view, without the luxury of assistance from either aircraft or photography, their efforts were not half bad. In those days, map-making was not in any sense a structured science; copyright did not exist and cartographers thought nothing of copying and revising each other’s maps and then publishing them without checking for accuracy.

  From 1550 onwards, a long lineage of cartographers were charged (by the Queen or their patron) to feel for a change in the city’s pulse, while recording every spurt of growth and movement. Unfortunately, in September 1666, the Great Fire of London destroyed 13,000 buildings, including over eighty churches. Most existing charts, records and maps, which could not have been re-published anyway, such was the extent of the damage, were lost.

  Over the next ten years, rebuilding schemes presented to Charles II by Dr Christopher Wren and John Evelyn provided the foundations for our capital today.

  The maps that gave Phyllis Pearsall the skeleton of her A-Z were drawn up by a military organisation founded in 1791 which used a corps of the Royal Engineers to conduct scientific land surveys. The Ordnance Survey – ordnance meaning military equipment – was headed by generals until 1977. It had one prime objective: to make ‘ordinary maps for ordinary people’. Why the military? The government in the 1790s strongly believed that accurate maps would aid political stability and help the armed forces to prepare for any invasion threats from France.

  It was not until 1848 that the OS turned their attention to the capital, in a survey that took two years. Cholera was choking the city and the government wanted to plot the drainage system.

  During that survey, for the first time ever, height was taken into account when mapping. Before, tall features such as churches and hills had been shown as flat, which prevented a precise reading. Control points and observatories were constructed on top of tall structures (e.g. the 92-foot wooden tower lashed to the cross of St Paul’s Cathedral, and using a theodolite, a scientific instrument for measuring exact angles, the Victorian cartographers took down 900 points in under five months. Then, by taking all the readings of factory chimneys, church spires and the like, the OS team devised a system of triangles which covered the two hundred square miles of the capital. Using a trigonometrical formula, those bearings translated into precise maps. Of course, the maps were not sold to the public, since the scale allowed for five feet to the mile – with the result that the final version added up to 847 separate sheets.

  Today, the OS claims that Britain produces the most detailed maps in the world; as the first place to have a complete mapp
ing database, we now have the whole process down to a computerised format. The old methods of cutting and pasting transparent plastic sheets on light tables, of photo-draughtsmen using cutters and strips of bone to paste down changes, no longer exist. Since 1998, surveyors have not touched the tools that had been used for centuries. Wooden mapping boards and set-squares were replaced by touch-sensitive screens that record any feature over eight square metres. Data is not redrawn once back from the field – it is sent straight to the National Topographic Database. It has recorded 321,162 miles of road and about 200 million features, although many never actually appear on paper.

  When you know that Harry Beck, the twenty-nine-year-old engineering draughtsman who devised the 1933 London Underground map, received a paltry five guineas in payment for one of the most famous maps in history, then it is easy to see why his forefathers fared no better.

  Little is recorded about even the most distinguished early cartographers who depicted London. Few, it seems, were actual Londoners, and more often than not they were foreigners. Cartography was not a respected profession and the rewards were hardly exciting for the months and years spent plotting hundreds of streets, weighed down by a cumbersome ‘waywiser’. The latter was a wheeled instrument that calculated miles in revolutions, i.e. for a diameter of 8 feet 3 inches, it was 640 revolutions to the mile.

  Like Phyllis and to a lesser extent Sandor, a lack of money nagged at former cartographers. They needed to convince others of the need for maps, and secure financial backers to keep them from the poorhouse until the last inch on the map had been drawn. And that could sometimes take years.

  George III subscribed to Richard Horwood of Hackney’s map of Regency London when in 1799, he published his original thirty-two sheets in instalments. Horwood took nine years to finish his survey. He attempted to do the same in his native Liverpool, but the stressful years had taken their toll and he died there in 1803, a pauper aged forty-five. Before him, John Rocque, a French Huguenot immigrant who became a Royal Topographer, died in the 1780s with two shillings to his name. Which is quite surprising, considering that he arrived in Soho in 1734 and after working as a gardening surveyor for the landed gentry, had begun to do commercial mapping. In 1746, the public were invited to his print shop on Hyde Park Corner to view his map of London. With his engraver John Pine, he had created a beautiful work of art, approximately 13 feet wide and 6 feet deep, in which buildings, gardens, parks and fields were given careful treatment of shading.

  Of course, there is always an exception to the rule. John Ogilby, who was born in Scotland in 1600, saw actual success in his lifetime, and an etching survives of him presenting King Charles II and Queen Catherine with a heavy volume listing the subscribers to the Survey of the City map he and William Morgan were preparing. Success only came to him late in life though, at the age of sixty-nine, when he set his sights on cartography after losing his publishing house in the Great Fire of London. Sadly, Ogilby never got to see his great work, as he died in 1676 – exactly one month before his work appeared.

  Size and scale plagued the early cartographers: how did one condense an area to master both the details and accuracy? It was not until the late 1880s that pocket street atlases settled on a scale of four or six inches to the mile. As for size – it would be the eighteenth century before maps would appear as one whole sheet. Until then they were published as individual sheets and bound into atlases, such as John Speed’s map of London and surrounding areas in 1610 which included 54 regional maps which he combined into a single volume on England and Wales, or used as illustrations for history books and guides to London.

  How exactly did one consult a map such as Ogilby’s, a map which stretched to 8 feet wide and 4 feet deep? Rocque’s was no smaller and his suggestion to the customer was to transform the map ‘into a beautiful and useful screen’ or back it with linen and attach to a pulley for a sort of blind that might be fixed to the corner of the wainscot, so that it didn’t interfere with the other furniture, and then ‘be let down to examine at Pleasure’.

  An advancement came in the shape of linen, such as Greenwood’s 1827 map which meant the sheet could be folded and would last a great deal longer than paper.

  The simple use of monochromatic tones was satisfactory for most map-makers until the mid-nineteenth century, when mechanically coloured ones were priced at 1s 6d rather than 1s 0d. Until then, hand-coloured maps had been established, using blue for water, green for parks and open spaces, and a beige or yellow for roads.

  In the nineteenth century there was a burst of cartographers, from G.F. Cruchley and James Wyld to George Philip and G.W. Bacon, who combined every process of map-making in one place – cartographer, printer, publisher and map-seller. With ballooning the latest hobby, their map to celebrate the Great Exhibition in 1851 was called A Balloon View of London (as seen from Hampstead). The scale is askew although every building is shown in perspective and it is quite an extraordinary map, although it is doubtful that it was really drawn from life.

  Map publishers certainly took into account the public’s interest in outdoor pursuits – hence the Cycling Map, the Literary Homes Map and in 1917 for 7d you could buy one of George Philip & Son of Fleet Street’s envelope cases that held thirty-two postcard-sized maps, each numbered and charting a section of London.

  Of course, Phyllis Pearsall was not the first to take to the streets in order to map London. Yet before the first London A-Z was published in 1936, the popularity of maps had been sporadic. They were considered an academic luxury rather than a practical household necessity. In the years before the roads were littered with cars, more often than not a map was not about travelling or finding your way from one place to another; its function was as a social and historical document.

  The obsession in Victorian society with class and wealth was exacerbated by the well-meaning social reformer Charles Booth who, in 1889, devised his own Poverty Map. A wealthy founder of a Liverpool shipping line, he decided to conduct his own survey of the public’s living conditions, eleven years after he settled in London. Gathering a team of investigators, and using seven different colours, he plotted the capital on a 25 inches: 1 mile Ordnance Survey map, published by Edward Stanford, a printer and map-maker of Cockspur Street. The extraordinary categories ran as follows: Lowest Class (vicious, semi-criminal), Very Poor (casual, chronic want), Poor (18s to 21s a week far a moderate family), Mixed (some comfortable, others poor), Fairly Comfortable (good ordinary earnings), Middle Class (well to do), Upper-Middle and Upper Classes (wealthy).

  The findings would reveal that 30 per cent lived in poverty and 70 per cent comfortably. It would also point to how the Prince Regent’s favourite architect, John Nash, in building Regent Street in 1821 (and demolishing Great Swallow Street) had separated Soho from Mayfair, and sparked a great class divide.

  In 1867, a map alerting the public to the most dangerous areas during the cholera epidemic was published. Another followed in 1899, concentrating on the East End, to show the Deposition of Jews and Gentiles across the world.

  The twentieth century has seen enormous changes in the map-making process with the advancement of technology, but in many ways the London symbols, such as a red dot or circle indicating the Underground, or a green wash for parks and blue lines for the banks of the River Thames have settled into an instantly recognisable format. Not everyone is happy though. It is as well to know that the world of cartography that Phyllis gate-crashed is as rarefied as the art world to which her brother belonged. Commercially, she stole the show, but her reputation, up until her death in 1996, was regarded within the profession rather sniffily:

  These conventional colours are of course of enormous assistance in distinguishing between the crowded details of a London street guide: the difference can best be appreciated when one compares the copy of a cheap monotone guide such as the A-Z with Bartholomew’s or Philip’s expensive colour atlases. (Philippa Glanville, ‘London in Maps’, The Connoisseur, 1972.)

  Everyone
else, it seems, was taking mapping terribly seriously. If you weren’t a scientist, with an academic or mathematical background, then how could you possibly compete? Historians and antiquarians began to add layers of dust to protect those drawn up in the past, instead of celebrating all maps, including the A-Z.

  Neither the name Phyllis Pearsall nor that of her father were anywhere to be found, in any of my research. It is strange that the very term A-Z is as familiar to the public as the brand-names Sellotape and Hoover, yet The History of London in Maps and The Times Atlas of London included every other conceivable morsel of information, but had quite pointedly left out Phyllis and Sandor. Were they really so dreadful? The fast-food makers of mapping? Not according to Peter Barber, Deputy Librarian at the British Map Library, who senses that the old traditional view of cartography is slowly changing. The maverick character of Phyllis Pearsall is finally beginning to be appreciated:

  ‘In the past,’ he told me, ‘snobbery censured map-makers for distorting reality and not producing traditional maps. There is no such thing as an accurate map; there is bound to be distortion, depending on what purpose it sets out to serve.

  ‘Phyllis Pearsall was disliked for being so obviously commercial and instead should have been recognised for starting a trend towards more common cartography. She put a premium on clarity and design over mathematical accuracy, which is much more in keeping with today’s style. Until recently, the art of mapping was subordinated to measurement. Phyllis went beyond the patron, to tailor the base needs of the map to a particular segment of society.

  ‘Now if you were to go house-hunting using an A-Z, you may find a house but not see any green spaces nearby. That may not be strictly true. You are just looking at the wrong sort of map – for that you should look at an Ordnance Survey one. There is a degree of honesty about the A-Z; it distorts reality with a clear objective in mind – to guide the pedestrian and the driver to their destination.’