Thoughts from the Bus Stop

Magnificent Maps: Power, Propaganda and Art at the British Library

The Klencke Atlas, 1660 © 2010 The British Library Board.

A tasty Culture24 Picture Special: Magnificent Maps: Power, Propaganda and Art at the British Library

Dale Maxey: Seeing London

All images in this post are from 'Seeing London' by Dale Maxey (c) Collins, 1966

I spent a few days in Kent last week seeing my old schoolfriend Sharry. The trip was mainly to do with my forthcoming bridesmaidly duties, but Sharry was lovely enough to give me my fix of charity shops, in Maidstone. The very last one we went in - and nearly didn't because at first - it seemed to be a furniture-only shop - turned up this gem of a book, Seeing London, written and illustrated by Dale Maxey, printed in 1966.

I always look at the kids' books in charity shops to see if there are any by my favourite illustrators (Janet and Allan Ahlberg, Jill Barklem's Brambly Hedge books) or that just catch my eye. This was only 50p, AND has a sort-of bus on the front cover, so I just grabbed it without much flicking through it! But when we got home, and I starting looking at it properly, I got more and more excited...

It's a children's guide to London, with wonderful illustrations, hand-drawn maps and lovely writing, describing six different excursions you could take from Trafalgar Square on a big red doubledecker bus, to museums, galleries and landmarks where you don't need to be with an adult to get in (you can tell it's 40 years old!). Maxey says that London's buses remind him of elephants, "lumbering along through the mist that often seems to shroud the city", and this theme runs through the illustrations.

 

The covers and endpapers are in full colour but most of the illustrations are in just black and white, sometimes with red accents. There are two full colour maps of London (click on them for larger versions)...

... and several monochrome ones, labelled with the various places visited in each excursion:

 

The pictures are bursting with life and good humour. Just look at this one, enticing you to take a dip in the Serpentine Lido. I love the girl holding her nose as she goes under the water - especially the way her hair and the skirt on her swimming costume are flying up!

I couldn't find a biog of Dale Maxey online, but he seems to have concentrated on children's books, including illustrations for an edition of Edward Lear's The Owl & The Pussycat.

You can find Dale Maxey images on Google. I'll carry on scanning in this book and put my images in a Dale Maxey set on Flickr, and set up a Dale Maxey group, see if anyone bites. Ateeeeeeeeeeen'shun!!!

 

 

19.03.2014 - edited to add: For more info on the work of Dale and Betty Maxey, read this lovely post on the Fishink blog: http://fishinkblog.wordpress.com/2013/03/08/dale-maxey-illustrator-from-the-1950s

Routemaster bus postage stamp

 

Here's my favourite of the latest special issue stamps from Royal Mail - the Routemaster bus, from their British Design Classics issue.

The set also includes Harry Beck's amazing tube map, Mary Quant's miniskirt and Robin Day's polypropylene stacking chair.

Images (c) Royal Mail

* SONG OF THE DAY: The Carpenters - Please Mr Postman *

Map Quilts by Ian Hundley

Bierbergen Oedelum Black (c) Ian Hundley, 2006

Ian Hundley is a Brooklyn-based artist who transforms maps into amazing large-scale quilts. Watch this video from Cool Hunting, where they meet with Ian to discuss his inspirations and capture his process.

Jem Finer: On Earth as in Heaven

On Earth as in Heaven (c) Jem Finer 2005

Also part of the Day-to-Day Data project is Jem Finer's online work On Earth as in Heaven. He's taken a star map and traced the connotations of each star's name:

"To the astronomer stars are data; catalogued, numbered and mapped, graded by size, colour, spectral content and red shift. Their names date back to an earlier age when, ordered into constellations, their passage across the night sky was a clock, a beacon, a calendar for agriculture, a map for navigation, bound in myth... Some star names (where they had them) proved so problematic I had to dig far down the line of alternative nomenclature - numbers, Greek letters and abbreviations - to find even one terrestrial manifestation. With others, references were only to themselves or ‘useless’ data. The star ‘Pione’, for example, repeatedly yielded typos for the word ‘phone’. Eventually, after over 40 pages of results, I found a Pione handbag…"

I can't look at this work without Blur's weird and wonderful Far Out playing in my head:

I spy in the night sky don't I
Phoebe Io Elara Leda
Callisto Sinope
Janus Dione Portia
So many moons
Quiet in the sky at night
Hot in the Milky Way
Outside in
Vega Capella Hadar
Rigel Barnard's Star
Antares Aldebaran Altair
Wolf 359 Betelgeuse
Sun sun sun sun sun...

A Little Christmas Walk

A Little Christmas Walk © Edward Hill 2006

Via Adele Prince's site, I spotted a link to her husband Edward Hill's Little Christmas Walk, a lovely map-based artwork reminiscent of Tom Phillips' 20 Sites n Years.

20 Sites n Years © Tom Phillips

In other map-based artistic shenanigans, Adele and Edward have been trekking around British cities Trolley Spotting, as part of Adele's contribution to the Day-to-Day Data art show.

World Map Shower Curtain!

I love our new shower curtain - props to The Blonde for spotting it in the Argos catalogue. We've already learned a lot about global geography - and realised how ignorant we are... I had to look up Myanmar as I'd never heard of it - hadn't a clue it was another name for Burma, to my shame.

London: A Life in Maps

Panorama of London, William Smith, 1588. Copyright © The British Library Board

London: A Life in Maps, is on at The British Library from 24 November 2006 – 4 March 2007:

"Take a look at London as you have never seen it before. This once-in-a-lifetime exhibition brings to life London’s lost lanes and landmarks, parks and palaces, riots and railways, towers and temptations.

Maps, views, letters, and ephemera from the British Library collections, show the city’s transformation from a Roman outpost to the huge, heaving metropolis of today - and look to the Olympic and post-Olympic future.

In a series of magnificent maps and panoramas, London’s growth spreads before you through disease and fire, property booms and commercial expansion, war and comprehensive redevelopment. At the same time lesser-known images will enable you to see why and how these changes happened, and to catch a glimpse of Londoners’ lives and values, hopes and fears, preoccupations and aspirations through the ages.

Discover the ‘lost’ London’s you never knew - the great estates and the workhouses, the palaces and prisons, the grand churches and vast dockyards, the ancient villages and vanishing fields."

There's a book out too - London: A Life in Maps by Peter Whitfield. Looks tasty - have I mentioned that I love maps?

This Is A Low

And into the sea goes pretty England and me
Around the Bay of Biscay and back for tea
Hit traffic on the Dogger bank
Up the Thames to find a taxi rank
Sail on by with the tide and go asleep
And the radio says

This is a low
But it won't hurt you
When you're alone it will be there with you
Finding ways to stay solo

On the Tyne, Forth and Cromarty
There's a low in the high Forties
Saturday's locked away on the pier
Not fast enough dear
And on the Malin head
Blackpool looks blue and red
And the Queen, she's gone round the bend
Jumped off Land's End...

This Is A Low, Blur

It dawned on me the other day that I haven't posted in weeks. Why? Because I couldn't be bothered. I can't bothered with a lot of things lately. I have an unwelcome guest, who hasn't been around for a few years but is back and sapping my energy, appetites and motivation, making me withdrawn and unproductive. Thanks, Depression - how long were you planning on staying?

And yet... I have been moved to post by My New Favourite Thing: the Shipping Forecast teatowel which the fragrant Mr & Mrs Ison bought me on their hols. They know how much I love maps (and map scarves and map teatowels), and I'd also told them about my fondness for Blur's This Is A Low, whose lyrics were inspired by a hanky printed with the shipping regions map, a Christmas present from Alex to Damon,. I'd mentioned how many years I'd been looking for such a hanky, in vain. I have very good friends.

This Is A Low is one of those atmospheric, ambiguous songs you can project your own feelings on. It's perfect when I need something which has substance but doesn't require much effort on my part for it to minister to me. It soothes me in my melancholic moments - as does listening to the Shipping Forecast on Radio 4 - poetry, both of them.

The artist Mark Power has taken photos in each shipping forecast region - view them on his website, or there's a book available.

Also:
YouTube: Blur perform 'This Is A Low' at Glastonbury in 1994

Sussex teatowel bag

Click on the pics for larger versions (c) Kristen Bailey

Oh Sussex, Sussex by the Sea
Good old Sussex by the Sea
You can tell them all that we'll stand or fall
For Sussex by the Sea

I found this lovely linen 'Sussex' teatowel in a charity shop last weekend and I've made in into a bag, because I love Sussex and I especially love the map, with all the place names on it - so many which hold meaning for me.

Am on the lookout for more 'map' teatowels now. I've got loads of satin scarves with maps on but linen teatowels are easier to work with and make sturdier bags. Another fad is upon me!

Also: Flickr: More Little Fish bags

Mr Beck's Underground Map

Harry Beck's 1933 design for the London Underground Map (c) Transport for London

I've had a few maps links building up for a while and Dave has prompted me to get on and post them by urging his readers to vote for Harry Beck's London Underground Map, which has made it into the top 3 of the BBC's Great British Design Quest. The
Transport for London site offers the tube map in many translations. And ooh, look - you can get a London Underground Map mouse mat from London's Transport Museum!

I have a lovely book about the map's development - Mr Beck's Underground Map by Ken Garland. I see there is now a 'sequel' - Underground Maps After Beck by Maxwell J. Roberts. Then there are Mark Ovenden's Metro Maps of the World books (1 and 2).

Elsewhere, 30gms is disappointed by an attempt by The Guardian's Dorian Lynskey to chart the branches and connections of 100 years of music using the London Underground map (pdf of that map here), and links to Geofftech's Tube Map Variations and Spin-Offs. Boing Boing posts about anagram transit maps, and has examples for Miami, Dublin, Ontario, Dallas, Glasgow, Portland, Ottawa and Houston.

Check out the amazing map of the Moscow subway - brought to my attention by the BBC's Map Man telly programme. Further Googling has turned up maps for Sydney, Glasgow ('The Clockwork Orange') and Helsinki.

And of course, I can't finish without mentioning a favourite reworking of Harry Beck's tube map - Simon Patterson's The Great Bear.

Laura Cantrell's NYC Subway Map

I was dead chuffed to see that Laura Cantrell, one of my favourite singers, has renamed the stations and lines on the NYC Subway Map to pay tribute to her musical heroines (most of whom I'm ashamed to say I've never heard of) and flag up the free download of 14th Street, a track from her latest album, Humming By The Flowered Vine:

"This map places some the women artists I most admire along the subway lines of New York City, where I live. There isn't much organizing principle, other than the color-coded categories and the kick of seeing Rose Maddox's line crossing Hazel Dickens en route to Brooklyn..."

I love maps, and art made from or about maps. There's Simon Patterson's The Great Bear (1992), which I think was the first instance of someone renaming the stations on an underground map. (The title refers to the constellation Ursa Major, a punning reference to Patterson's own arrangement of 'stars'.) I also like JP 233 In CSO Blue, where he's renamed stars and constellations.

Then there's my longterm favourite Tom Phillips (see his 20 Sites n Years project), and Harry Beck, not a artist but a draughtsman - the man who designed the London Tube map. And ever since I heard about how Damon Albarn from Blur wrote the gorgeous This Is A Low by looking at the names on a shipping forecast map hankerchief, I've wished I had one (see item 80 on this page for a full explanation). It was from Stanfords in Covent Garden - one day I'll get round to going along to see if they still stock them.

Finally, I can't resist quoting some underground map-based innuendo from Friends (when they were all in London for Ross and Emily's wedding):

Judy Geller: Oh sorry we're late, my fault. I insisted on riding the tube.
Jack Geller: Judy? The kids...
Judy Geller: Jack, that's what they call the subway.

NYC Transit: Official NYC Subway Map
Going Underground: Geographically Correct London Underground Map
Amazon.co.uk: Mr Beck's Underground Map

The Knitting Map

Webcam image of Cork's Knitting Map (c) www.halfangel.ie

Another great piece of knitted art in progess: Cork's Knitting Map:

"Above the earth there is a satellite which looks down at Cork and watches the movements of people and cars around the city. Through a strange technical alchemy, this information is transformed into a knitting pattern, which constantly shifts - some hefty cabling during rush hour; quiet lulls of stocking stitch on Sunday mornings; bobbles of blackberry stitches for the un-quotidian gatherings of Cork mortals.

Down in the city there is a large empty hall, with a semicircle of chairs. It is here that fifty people knit for a year. They work in relay, their knitting moving slowly into the space between them, where the strips are sewn together to form a single vast document of the city. The hue of yarn shifts with the weather, and the descent of the year.

During the day, people arrive to view the installation. They hear low voices, and the tapping of knitting needles. Before them this great knitted cartography, moves gradually across the space and then begins to pile up of the floor of the hall in the half-light..."

Little Green Book

Sharry requested a homemade card for her 30th birthday. I didn't know what to buy her for a pressie, so I took the making of the card to The Next Level. This is made from one piece of rectangular card, simply folded and cut according to a great basic pattern from Creating Handmade Books by Alisa Golden.

I made it in her favourite colour and included a little '30' cake decoration, definitions cut from an old dictionary, maps, a stamp by Peter Howson (her favourite artist), bits of old artwork of mine (heavily endebted to Tom Phillips' A Humument), old photos and photos of 'number 30' houses in Brighton and Hove streets. The '30' on the front is made from french knitting. Then I made a simple folder with a ribbon tie and her name in letter beads. It's bits of me and bits of her and things she's into and things we've done together - since we were 12, bless!

I'll be in Scotland afore ye

The Great Bear, 1992 (detail), by Simon Patterson

More exhibitions which I love the sound of but can't get to cos they're in Scotland! That's it, I'm moving. Glasgow will do nicely.

* Bags of Style at the Royal Museum, Edinburgh, 'looking at the status and function of bags in contemporary societies'
* Patterns of Childhood: Samplers 1640-1900 at Scotland Street School Museum, Glasgow
* Simon Patterson at the Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh. I love his The Great Bear, what with my love of maps and admiration of Harry Beck and Tom Phillips - bought a poster at the Tate last summer but still haven't framed it. Kind of wish I'd waited and spent my 30th birthday money on the £55 framed print.

'Listen to me, butterfly...'

Butterfly book, Julie Cockburn, 2004

Went up to the V&A on Tuesday to review the Christopher Dresser show. While I was there I had a scoot round the shop, and saw some wonderful stuff on the Crafts Council's stand. I loved Cathy Miles' wall pieces - wittily captioned wire 'drawings' of birds, embellished with found objects, with a Southport theme.

But it was Julie Cockburn's stuff which really make me catch my breath. This woman HAS to be a Tom Philips fan - she works with books, and maps and postcards. There was an atlas whose pages she had sculpted into three dimensions, and a great piece of postcard assemblage called Man in Red seeks Women in Yellow - very reminiscent of Phillips' The Quest for Irma. (I'm not criticising here - this is the sort of stuff I'd try to produce if I was a working artist!) Her Butterfly Book is just amazing - I wish I had the £900. More examples of her work HERE.

And finally... flicking through a copy of Crafts, I see that Michael Brennand-Wood has a new exhibition (Field of Centres) on tour! Woo-hoo!