Update March 2022: Atlas of Imagined Places has won the Edward Stanford Prize for Best Illustrated Travel Book, 2022.
Remember our 'Fake Britain' map? The one that showed about 1,000 fictional British places from film, TV, novels, comics and video games?
Well, in an act of epic scope creep, it's now been turned into a world atlas.
Londonist editor-at-large Matt Brown, and co-author Rhys B Davies, have taken the concept to the entire planet in their Atlas of Imagined Places.
The book includes 5,000 locations - everywhere from Bedrock to Erinsborough, Vice City to Wakanda - drawn from varied works of fiction, but plotted alongside one another like some madcap alternative reality.
The atlas is sumptuously illustrated by Mike Hall, whose glorious maps and illustrations of London have long beguiled us.
The book comes with a full guide to the many sources, with notes on how the locations were sleuthed. The authors even claim to have found a plausible location for Springfield from the Simpsons, despite that show being notoriously coy and tricksy about its whereabouts.
The London area contains a few notable locations. Walford, of course, from Eastenders and Canley from The Bill. At the more literary end is Valley Fields from PG Wodehouse and Ham - the island from Book of Dave, formerly known as Hampstead. And then there's East Cheam, which will be immediately obvious to older, British readers (an invention of Tony Hancock).
A map on this resolution, though, can only scratch the surface of fictional London. For that, you can always browse our map of the Unreal City, which contains hundreds of fictional places in the capital.
Atlas of Imagined Places by Matt Brown and Rhys B Davies is out now from Batsford. Available via Bookshop.org or Amazon, and in all good book shops.
