Beautiful Explorer's Maps Of London Areas

By Londonist Staff Last edited 89 months ago
Beautiful Explorer's Maps Of London Areas

London can be a tricky place to get to grips with, especially if you're a London newbie. Regular visitor to London Ed Cooper knows this, which is why he put together these hand-drawn explorer maps of the city.

Rather than showing London verbatim, they are interpretations of certain areas. We'll let him explain the rest himself:

Coming from a rural background I have always loved to look around the parks and now realise that compared to other European cities, London has a valuable amount of well-kept parkland. My maps celebrate this by imagining the parks as verdurous islands in a vast torrential ocean — a metaphor that dramatises the difference between the crowded city streets and the peaceful space of the parks. The scale of the maps is a commentary on the size of the city, being a 'world' of its own.

He submitted one of these maps as part of his Fine Art MA coursework.

His inspiration comes from Stephen Walter's 'Island' maps of London and to a greater extent Layla Curtis's collaged maps.

Fancy having a go at drawing your own map of an area of London? Email it to hello@londonist.com, and we'll publish our favourites. Need more inspiration? Find it here.

Last Updated 06 October 2016