London maps: are we lost, and what does it mean to be found?

By Max Leonard, le cool London 

Stephen Walter’s cartographical artwork The Island (2008), currently on display at the British Library, portrays London as an island floating unencumbered by the rest of the country, riffing on the often justifiable gripe against Londoners by out-of-towners that the metropolis is largely unaware that civilisation exists beyond the boundaries of its orbital roads. 

Within the lapping shores of the M25, however, the map is both constituted and obscured by dense handwritten notes recording place names and personal recollections of the locations. It is almost impossible to read in a conventional way, reflecting, perhaps, the fact that maps are rarely, if ever, simply about geography and getting where you want to go. And, with sat nav in most cars and Google maps on every iPhone, it’s very possible that physical paper maps will soon no longer be deemed useful for this fundamental task. Nobody now needs the delicately shaded contours of an OS map to direct them: they can just blithely follow a screen. Action without understanding. We are becoming a civilisation which, quite literally, does not know where it’s going. The probable demise of Stanford’s aside, is this a bad thing? It is, at the very least, a thing. So it goes. 

No better time, then, to reflect on maps as art, as one is invited to do at the British Library’s Magnificent Maps exhibition, which includes both Walker’s map of London and Grayson Perry’s … well, Grayson Perry’s map of himself. Map of Nowhere (2008) is an homage to the medieval mappa mundi that attempted to represent all the world’s knowledge within an ill-defined sphere (some facsimiles of the originals are also on display).  

Decidedly there is something in the air. Next week Whose Map Is It? opens at Iniva (the Institute of International Visual Arts). It promises new approaches to mapping using film, installation, print and audio from global contemporary artists, and includes a Thames river map that highlights London’s north/south divide. And, last week, London Underground unveiled its latest Art on the Underground commission, by American artist Barbara Kruger. Her map of the tube system, which substitutes the familiar station names for more esoteric or abstract words (eg: ‘Reason’ for Westminster) has attracted criticism for being heavily influenced by Simon Patterson’s The Great Bear (2001), which did much the same thing. The Great Bear is owned by the Tate, but it does not hang in Tate Modern. Exit through the gift shop, however, and you’re sure to find a print to purchase.  

Incidentally, a reproduction of Harry Beck’s classic original schematic Tube map from 1931 hangs on the platform at Finchley Central, his home station, far out in the north-western hinterlands of the Northern Line.  
 

PICTURE CREDIT: Detail from Stephen Walter’s The Island (2008), courtesy of the British Library Board. 
 

Magnificent Maps: Power, Propaganda and Art until 19 September
The British Library
96 Euston Road
NW1 2DB
Free 

Whose Map Is It?, from 2 June until 24 July
Iniva
Rivington Place
EC2A 3BA
Free 

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