London

An edition from the early '60s

Today, of course, they use powerful bespoke software to draw their maps. What hasn’t changed is the time-honoured method of constructing maps on a page. Part of the process involves incorporating a deterrent to plagiarists. A tiny, deliberate mistake is included on each map, and anyone reproducing the error makes it obvious that they’re copying the ‘A-Z’ without permission.The original index was the work of Mrs Pearsall herself, and was compiled on 23,000 handwritten cards. She often took to the streets on foot to verify her information, and she liked to tell the story of how she lost Trafalgar Square when a bunch of cards flew out of her office window on a sudden gust of wind. To this day, the company sets great store by the personal touch of its employees. The current crop of draughtsmen – the are 55 people in the drawing office – individually take their pages from start to finish, including checking details on the ground. A new London map is published every year, with roughly 30,000 alterations made for each edition. One avid fan regularly writes to the company listing pages of amendments to be made. Feature continues

The mid-'60s edition

Back in 1936, the ‘A-Z’ (so named by a woman near-demented by weeks of alphabetisation, although her father had instructed her to call it the ‘OK’) was an instant hit. The first copies, delivered on a borrowed hand-barrow by Mrs Pearsall to WH Smith and Woolworths, soon sold out, and word-of-mouth recommendation kept demand high. The war – and the government’s ban on selling maps which might be useful to a German invasion force – stopped production of the London map, but the company did well selling European maps to armchair generals and anxious wives, until it ran out of paper.

After the war, London’s new landscape of bombsites and hastily built social housing needed mapping, and there were plenty of customers in the form of demobbed servicemen keen to enjoy the city’s delights. Though Mrs Pearsall’s ill health (she survived a plane crash and a stroke in 1946) meant she had to delegate the day-to-day running of the business to others, it flourished, printing Manchester and Birmingham atlases in the early ’50s and expanding from there.

An edition from 1972

Mrs Pearsall put the company in trust in 1966, stipulating that it could never be sold off, that it would look after its workers and always promote from within, and would operate with ‘honesty and kindness’. Although she died in 1996 at the age of 89, Mrs Pearsall’s legacy lives on, and her memory is kept alive by former colleagues, who still celebrate her birthday on September 25 with a company cheese and wine party. ‘She enjoyed everyone she met,’ remembers Beryl Woodhams, one of the company directors. ‘She would talk to anyone. She had hundreds of names on her Christmas card list, and on every card she would write something personal. She remembered you. She would know all about her employees’ families, about their children and their problems. If somebody had a problem she’d make sure that it was attended to. It was like a family to her.’

Phyllis Pearsall’s plaque will be unveiled at 4pm on Wednesday July 12 at 3 Court Lane Gardens, SE21. For more information on the ‘A-Z’, visit www.a-zmaps.co.uk