Who Thought Of The London A-Z Map?
It was a lady named Phyllis Pearson who tried to go to a Belgravia party one day (in 1935). She had an Ordnance Survey map with her but still got lost, getting soaked to the skin. Street atlases as we know it simply didn’t exist. Pearson decided NEVER AGAIN, and set about making her own map. This was in the days before satellite images. Pearson spent up to 18 hours a day walking the streets of London to get the road names, lengths and intersections. It’s reckoned that she walked over 3000 miles that year. She only had one person to help her, a draughtsman named James Duncan. The project was funded using using commissions from her own artwork. The name A-Z came from the Index. A year after her frustrating night in the rain, the first edition of the A-Z Atlas and Guide to London and Suburbs came out. Publishers rejected her idea, so she paid herself to print 10,000 copies and sold them at WH Smith. They were an instant huge hit.
