A-Z London

Product Information

A street renaming scheme started in London in the 1850s and reached its conclusion in 1939. So it’s no surprise to the find a large section included in the book on the London County Council street name changes. More Information She also took on the laborious task of card indexing the street names alphabetically in preparation for typesetting. In addition to a map of the London Underground (central area), a West End Theatres map and a West End Cinemas map are also featured within this atlas. The map index contains over 300,000 entries with nearly 100,000 streets, over 200,000 postcodes, plus thousands of places of interest, hospitals and rail stations. All can be located on this high quality map within a few seconds using the search feature or by browsing the index. The search now reaches out to the internet for additional selections when an internet connection is available.

Straight away I was comparing with now and found plenty of differences as well as plenty that has remained. Bethnal Green Museum is now the V&A Museum of Childhood. And the Home Office Industrial Museum is long gone so you can no longer see “appliances for the promotion of health amongst industrial workers”.

A-Z Maps

Onto the book. It was billed as the ‘A to Z Atlas and Guide to London and Suburbs’. The cover was proud to announce the maps included house numbers along main streets and 23,000 streets (9,000 more than any other similar atlas index). The Geographers' A–Z Street Atlas, commonly shortened to A–Z (pronounced "Ay to Zed"), is a title given to any one of a range of atlases of streets in the United Kingdom produced by Geographers' A–Z Map Company Limited. Its first atlas, of London, was originally compiled in the 1930s by Phyllis Pearsall. The company she founded now publishes street maps of many cities and towns in the UK.

I love looking at old maps of London so was pleased to come across this London A-Z Street Atlas – Historical Edition. Clubland is not a map of nightclubs but instead of the gentlemen’s clubs, many of which are still functioning today. in 1972, the company name was changed from Geographers' Map Company to Geographers' A–Z Map Company.I discovered the Agricultural Hall in Islington is now the Business Design Centre. It was used for large cattle, horse and dog shows as well as trade exhibitions. The book starts with some themed maps such as Theatreland and even Shopping Centres and Parking Places. There’s no DLR or The O2. And the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park has clearly changed beyond recognition. In one scheme, the letters JIHGFEDCBA represent the digits 1 to 9 and 0, so that HFD would be 357, indicating a publication date of March 1957. This seems to have been used on all the company's folding maps, and possibly also those in book form.

An area extending to: London Zoo to the north, Tower Bridge to the east, Tate Britain to the south and Kensington Palace to the west At around the age of 29, Pearsall directed some draughtsmen to begin drawing up this new type of street map while she compiled much of the information necessary to update the maps. It’s sais she walked the streets of London for up to 18 hours a day hand plotting the street alignment and compiling ancillary information including house numbers along principal thoroughfares. In South Kensington, while the Natural History Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum are noted the Science Museum is not. It was there at the time but was clearly not considered as important.Though the London A-Z itself is a triumph of detail and practicality, its inventor’s reputation as an artist and an eccentric has persisted. Might that be because her personality chimes so well with London’s own winding and unpredictable streets? Geographers’ Map Company was founded in 1936 by Phyllis Pearsall MBE (1906-1996) who, encouraged by her father Alexander Gross, took on the ambitious task of publishing up-to-date street mapping of London. The Geographers' A–Z Street Atlas and the story of how Phyllis Pearsall came to write the first edition covering London were featured in a 2005 episode of Nicholas Crane's Map Man TV programme. This revealed that, on all their maps, A–Z print a non-existent trap street so that they can tell if a map has been illegally copied from theirs, a technique used by several publishers of reference works (see fictitious entry). I moved a lot when I first came to London (25 times in 5 years) so I really got to know the A-Z. In the days before Google maps and mobile phones, the book was an essential item in any Londoner’s bag. These maps are a digital copy of the famous A-Z Street Maps of London with other UK cities available soon.