Reading a map of London, 1851

‘Topographical Problem’, Punch, 11 October 1851, p. 158, wood engraving

In this 1851 engraving from Punch, two visitors to London are trying to use a large folding map to find their way from Seven Dials in Covent Garden to the Eastern Counties Railway Station (now Liverpool Street station), a distance of approximately two miles. One visitor holds the map while the other squints up close at the presumably far too detailed map to try and measure the distance with his fingers, whilst holding a burning cigar between the fingers of his other hand. Actual experience seems to have confirmed Punch’s view that London maps were all but useless. When The Times reviewed the first English edition of Baedeker’s London and its Environs in 1878, its correspondent found its large pocket map ‘only convenient for consultation over a big table, and not in the crowded streets of the metropolis, especially on a windy day’. The writer recommended the adoption of ‘a series of sectional plans, similar to those in Baedeker’s admirable guide to Paris’. A year later, reviewing the second edition of the London guidebook, the newspaper was happy to see that Baedeker had ‘remedied’ this ‘defect’ by including a 45-page appendix of street lists and sectional plans ‘of the greatest practical utility’.

If The Times stressed the usefulness of certain types of map, then others were more sceptical of the genre as a whole. Charles Eyre Pascoe, the author of London of Today (1904), argued that his verbal descriptions of London’s main thoroughfares were far more effective that ‘sectional maps … which only tend to confuse’ and he exhorted his reader to use ‘his own powers of observation, reading, inquiry, and good-sense to direct him through’ the city. Likewise, in advertising its own aid to wayfinding – the detailed itinerary – Seven Days in London (1875) argued that a map of London only ‘confuses [strangers] with its complexity, and if they do glean from it some idea as to the direction in which they should proceed, when they attempt to pursue it, the noise and bustle in the streets to which they are quite unaccustomed, soon drive them out of their reckoning’. The guidebook’s solution was to provide ‘minutely described’ daily routes with ‘a little map of each route given in the place where it is wanted, thus avoiding the necessity of consulting the general map, a process which is awkward and troublesome in the crowded streets of London’.