London

I get lost all the time. I virtually get lost in my own flat. I’m lucky enough to get cars now. However, in my days of walking the streets of London I used to get lost all the time and was forever pulling out my ‘A-Z’. When I was a kid I used to have to write L and R on my hands to remember which one was which. I know the difference now, though! I spent a lot of time in New York, where I found the grid system so much easier to navigate. London is too higgledy-piggledy, especially around EC1 – all those Jack the Ripper streets and tiny alleyways. The alleys might be a little hard to read in the 'A-Z', but it’s definitely the best map book of its kind.
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Many Londoners use an ‘A-Z’ on a daily basis. Before that, there were Ordnance Survey maps which were the size of a person that you’d have to hold up in the street. In 1935, Phyllis Pearsall went to a party in Belgravia. Despite having an Ordnance Survey map, she couldn’t find the address. So she thought, 'Right, I’m going to walk all the streets of London and put them in a book with a handy index.' She walked 23,000 streets in London, waking at 5am to start and walking for 18 hours a day. She covered 3,000 miles in total – I’m sure her feet weren’t a pretty sight after that. Towards the end of putting the book together, she realised she’d left out Trafalgar Square and had to go back to it, which I think is brilliant – just fabulous! There’s no way she could have done it in heels, is there? She delivered the first 250 copies to WHSmith in a wheelbarrow. Another 10,000 were commissioned and then it really took off. She was a bit eccentric, and that’s why I’ve chosen her. Although I think she was quite mad. You’d have to be to walk 3,000 miles, wouldn’t you?

Streets ahead: we'd be lost (literally) without Pearsall's hard work

She was born in 1906 but Pearsall had a turbulent upbringing. It was really quite tragic. Her father was a Jewish immigrant and her mother a Catholic. Their parents severely disapproved of the marriage, which fell apart. Pearsall travelled all over Europe with her father and went to Roedean School, which was very smart, but was taken away at 14 when her father’s business went bankrupt. He bolted to America and her mother’s new partner wouldn’t let Pearsall live with them. So at just 14, she went to France and spent some time sleeping rough in Paris. She married at 16 without telling anyone and became a portrait painter. She actually continued painting portraits, and when she did the ‘A-Z’ she still considered herself an artist rather than a mere designer. Her mother was committed to an asylum, I think, after she remarried. I never met Pearsall. She died in 1996, just days before her ninetieth birthday.

I moved to London from Canterbury five or six years ago to start at the London College of Fashion and used my ‘A-Z’ all the time. I wanted to find out who this person was – her name’s in the back – and she turned out to be quite crazy, quite interesting. If you look at pictures of her, she was fabulous. She always had her hair down and looked quite major, even when she was 85 and wearing pearls and cashmere. I read her autobiography, ‘From Bedsitter to Household Name’, and it’s really juicy. She comes across as slightly mad, but then her family background was so unsettled. To cap it all, she survived a plane crash in 1945 which left her with injuries that plagued her for the rest of her life.