“The Phyllis Pearsall story is complete rubbish. There is no
evidence she did it and if she did do it, she didn’t need to.”
– Peter Barber, former head of maps at the British Library[1]
Geodesy: Earth Divide
I was eight years old when we moved
The Jurassic coast bejewelled with
ammonites, belemnites, crustaceans,
encased in layers of dirt a plethora of years.
buried beneath the topography of hills
the odyssey back to London to visit Grandma
on great conveyor belts with their cargo of human lives
sped up to 80mph
cutting through fields penned in by fences,
mapped on to the topography of hills
then the city rises on all sides,
skyscrapers, cranes and tower blocks
peering down onto our galaxy.
Ford Galaxy. Six seats. Filled with children.
in the pouch behind the driver’s seat
antiquating among tissues, car papers, and an ice scraper,
fossilising with the rise of GPS
The London A to Z
Strand, Old English origin, ‘strond’ meaning edge of the river.
Hanging Sword Alley, sign of a fencing school. 1564.
Dunsmure Road, Dunmore, Dundemor, Dunsmore, Dundemor
Dinsmore, Dunmuir, Dunsmore, Dunsmuir, Dunsmure. Gaelic, Big Hill Fort.
In Stamford Hill
Where Grandma lives.
True or False: [Y/N]
- In the A-Z, each double page spread is superimposed with a grid of blue squares, each with their own code to allow you to find a street in the index. [Y/N]
- Street names, seen from a bird’s eye view are evocative sites for the imagination to run wild. The history and stories that a street carries are muffled behind the roar of reckless mopeds, the tramping of morning commuters and the billions of lives that have flickered along them, imperceptible in the leviathan life span of the city. [Y/N]
- Maps are a means of imposing order on the chaotic web of streets that make up a city. [Y/N]
- They are how we find our way home. [Y/N]
There’s another question I’m often asked to answer – the one which identifies me as a Black African-White British passport holder.
The profound anomaly of the duplicitous map with its grid of blue squares mapped on roads in a shifting, assemblage of fluctuating rhythms, through multiple eras, beautiful and terrifying. I would trace the routes of streets with my finger, follow miles and miles of road in seconds. Warneford Street Dunsmure Road Rutland Road Great Western Road. What visions did they have of me? Along the contours of my homes, my time and my body, what did they see?
[1] The London A-Z was mapped out by writer and painter Phyllis Pearsall, in the 1930s. She claimed to have walked 3000 streets to check the exact names of 23,000 streets.
Femi Oriogun-Williams 