The London Designers Mapping Your Neighbourhood

By Lydia Manch Last edited 34 months ago
The London Designers Mapping Your Neighbourhood
Photo credit: MONOMAP.

We love a London map. So much that we made an enormous book of them.

And maybe we love a London map more now than ever. Something to help you reimpose your own London over pandemic London. Something to set against the steady flow of infographics turning the city into a crisscrossing network of risks and vectors. A small, defiant howl into the face of a very weird year.

Want a London centred on your childhood home/first flat/wedding venue? One spanning just the parameters of your favourite running route/pub crawl? Deep close-up on the Dalston kebab shop where you first met the LOYL? All within reach, thanks to these two small businesses doing beautiful and bespokeable things with the city's topography.

MONOMAP

MONOMAP launched a Kickstarter campaign back in 2020, and bowled through their funding targets in the first day. Orders are closed for now while they catch up with demand, but you can still design and save your map on their website for when they start taking new requests.

Their laser-cut maps are delicate paper lattices, suspended above their backing and creating the shadowy arteries of a second city underneath. Best suited to cities, the laser-cutting drops the land away as negative space, with only the city's pathways left in the paper. Roads and waterways lock together in the map like something a pulse could travel through. The end result is very beautiful, the editor tool (image below) is a lovely piece of design tech, the laser-cutting (video on Kickstarter) is hypnotic, and one of those is probably the reason we meant to buy zero of their maps and instead bought two.

MONOMAP.

Catford Creative Club

You might recognise these guys from Greenwich Market, where they've been selling their prints for years.

Their pre-printed catalogue runs to a handful of global cities, rivers and waterways picked out in foil, in single print, triptych and circular designs. We are, disloyally, just as into the NY circular map, with its grid pattern streets cut through with the organic swoop of the waterways, as the London triptych.

And Catford Creative Club take orders for custom coordinates, though you'll have to go via their Etsy page, collar them in person at Greenwich Market, or email info@catfordcreativeclub.com to talk price and advice.

Catford Creative Club.

Londonist maps

As well as our dazzlingly good-looking book of London maps — we have a book of London maps, did we mention? And a bunch of independent bookshops here you can order it from — we also have a few of our favourites to buy as prints.

Unlike the ones above, these aren't bespokable: just a slice of the inside of our minds for anybody wanting 900 data points in Britain's fictional landscape, on a big map, or London layered with its Anglo-Saxon etymology, hanging on their wall.

Last Updated 05 May 2021