London

There are three things anyone needs to find their way around London. The first is a copy of Time Out. The next is a tube map. The third is an ‘A-Z’. But since every ‘A-Z’ has a tube map on its cover, there are probably only two things anybody needs. Luckily for us, the makers of the ‘A-Z’ haven’t yet found a way of adding weekly arts and entertainment listings to their books (though they do admit to using Time Out to keep their ‘Places of Interest’ section up to date).

On Wednesday, Southwark Council plans to unveil a blue plaque at the house where Phyllis Pearsall MBE, the founder of the Geographer’s AZ Map Company, was born in 1906. The tribute is overdue; indeed, it’s odd that the atlas and its history aren’t more obviously represented within the capital. Though 20 million copies have been sold, the company has no physical presence in the city. Feature continues

The head office moved to Kent in 1962, and though there remained a shop and warehouse at Gray’s Inn Road, that disappeared two years ago, driven out by parking restrictions and the Congestion Charge. Yet the story of London’s first indexed, colour, up-to-date, easily portable atlas is closely tied to the story of the city itself.

A-Z from 1949

Both the ‘A-Z’ and Harry Beck’s tube map were born in the 1930s, as the capital was being transformed into a fast-moving, modern, technologically advanced city. Mrs Pearsall’s father, Alexander Gross, had started a family map-making business at the turn of the century, but he went bankrupt in the 1920s and decamped to America to start afresh, leaving his 14-year-old daughter to fend for herself. In 1936, with a new American company up and running, he wired the 30-year-old Phyllis – by then making her way independently as an artist – and instructed her to put the rest of her life on hold and restart the business in London. Her first product was a reprint of an American map of the world, sold door-to-door by her uncle and a team of salesmen. It did pretty well, even though she knew nothing about cartography, printing, or distribution. But the sales force quickly discovered that their ability to cold-call their way around London was severely hampered by the street maps they were using, which dated from before World War I. An idea dawned.

The first ‘A-Z’ was hand-drawn by one man, CH Fountain, and based on Ordnance Survey maps and local council information. One useful innovation – so obvious you hardly notice it – was that the roads were not drawn in proportion to their real width, as they are on OS maps. Chelsea Embankment, for example, is drawn nearly half as wide as the Thames, which means that there is plenty of room for clear lettering – and even house numbers. Legibility was deemed a top priority; before computers were introduced in the mid-’90s, an apprentice cartographer would spend his whole first year learning how to letter according to house style.