Architecture Archive

5 Fascinating Maps of London

By Dan Zambonini, January 2, 2011, 8:16 am in Architecture, Culture, History, Past

With a long history of conquest, disease, innovation and social reform, there’s more to London cartography than Harry Beck’s Tube Map.

1. John Snow’s Cholera Map

John Snow's Cholera Map, London

When over 500 people died of a cholera outbreak in Soho, London in 1854, John Snow mapped and identified patterns in the outbreak, clustered around the public water pump on Broad Street. This provided the evidence needed to affirm that the disease was spread through contaminated water, and not through the air, as many had thought. Read more at: 1854 Broad Street Cholera Outbreak on Wikipedia.

2. London Street Gangs

London Street Gangs Map

According to the London Street Gangs website, over 15,000 people in Greater London belong to one of 200+ gangs. This excellent community-based website offers a huge amount of research and news, including maps of claimed territories.

3. Charles Booth’s Poverty Maps

Charles Booth Poverty Map

When the claim was made in the late 1800s that 25% of Londoners lived in abject poverty, Charles Booth criticised the figure as an exaggeration. He set out to study the truth, investigating a wide range of social indicators and often living with working-class families for weeks at a time. His team of investigators also included Beatrice Potter, who would later found the London School of Economics and New Statesman magazine.

Booth and his team found that the number had actually been under-estimated, and as much as 35% of all Londoners lived in poverty.

The classification system used on the maps is interesting in itself, for the lack of modern political correctness in the wording: for the lowest class, ‘semi-criminal’, “their only luxury is drink”, whereas the middle-class are blessed with “much intelligence”.

4. Wenceslaus Hollar’s Survey of the Great Fire of London

Great Fire of London Map

In 1666, the Great Fire of London ravaged 436 acres and over 13,000 homes. After the fire, the king directed Wenceslaus Holler to survey the extent of the damage. Within months, and with the help of a team of surveyors, the plans were drawn in March 1667.

5. The Modern Plague of London: Pubs!

The Modern Plague of London Map

Who better to publish a handy map of Victorian London public houses than the Temperance Society! This 1886 map borrows from John Snow’s earlier work on mapping cholera in an attempt to depict alcohol as a spreading disease.

The map also has a connection to Charles Booth: one of his team later updated the map, and was told by a policeman that, “in the interests of sobriety there should be a greater number [of pubs] than there are. For he said you get drunkenness rows where there was a crowd.”

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Clan Kerr and The Legend of The Spiral Staircase

By Dan Zambonini, July 7, 2010, 4:09 pm in Architecture, Culture, Design, History, Past

The left-handed Clan Kerr and spiral staircases

Spiral staircases were a clever defence in medieval castles. They were almost always built with the spiral in the same direction (clockwise, when looking up from the bottom) so that the defending swordsman, who would either be coming down the stairs or backing up in reverse, could freely swing his sword. Conversely, the attacking swordsman (ascending the stairs) would have his swing blocked by the wall.

This, of course, assumed that both attacker an defender were right-handed, which most were.

Left-handed swordsman, though rare, had the advantage of surprise when attacking out-in-the-open – they had fought (and trained against) more right-handed opponents than their adversary had fought left-handed opponents. Their attack when ascending standard spiral staircases was also not blocked by the wall.

The warlike Clan Kerr trained to use their weapons with their left hands. Scottish Poet James Hogg (1770-1835) wrote, in The Raid of the Kerrs:

But the Kerrs were aye the deadliest foes
That e’er to Englishmen were known
For they were all bred left handed men
And fence [defence] against them there was none

and Walter Laidlaw wrote, in The Reprisal:

So well the Kerrs their left-hands ply
The dead and dying round them lie

Legend has it that, to allow them to more easily defend Ferniehirst Castle – seat of the Clan Kerr – the staircase was built spiralling in the other direction (see illustration above, with left-handed Kerr shown with ginger hair).

Is this true? Certainly, the castle does feature a reverse spiral staircase, but a 1993 study found no increased incidence of left-handedness in Kerrs.

Personally, I don’t Kerr whether it’s true or not – it’s a great story.

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Living Well with Less Space

By Amy Thibodeau, June 8, 2010, 10:15 pm in Architecture, Culture, Present

I am living a life of extremes right now. I’ve spent the last six weeks in a very large, luxurious home on the edge of the desert in Arizona. There are three large bedrooms all with en suite bathrooms and walk-in closets, an enormous ‘great room’, media room, etc. I’m not complaining – it’s been great – but it isn’t how I’m used to living and was certainly not possible in London, UK.

On Saturday, we’re heading to Mexico for six weeks to live in a small bungalow near the ocean with no air conditioning and fairly basic amenities. After our time in the land of air conditioning, SUVs and golf courses I have been a little apprehensive about how we’re going to adapt. Then I spent some time getting inspired by how much some creative people are able to make of tiny spaces. Here are some of my favourites:

Paul Elkins Tiny Mobile Shelter
“The shelter is lightweight, water tight and able to collect rainwater, and includes an area for displaying and selling handmade wares.” (Text and image from Apartment Therapy)


Gary Chang – 24 Rooms in One
“This room — the “maximum kitchen,” he calls it — and the “video game room” he was sitting in minutes before are just 2 of at least 24 different layouts that Mr. Chang, an architect, can impose on his 344-square-foot apartment, which he renovated last year. What appears to be an open-plan studio actually contains many rooms, because of sliding wall units, fold-down tables and chairs, and the habitual kinesis of a resident in a small space. As Mr. Chang put it, “I glide around.” (Text from the New York Times)

Tiny Apartments in a Hong Kong Housing Estate
Michael Wolf has documented many of these small 100 x 100 spaces. Some of residents make better use of their space than others. (Photo by Michale Wolf)

Living in a Yurt
“We talk all the time about living with less; Dave lives in 706 square feet with off grid power, a composting toilet, a shower and a full kitchen and didn’t give anything up at all to live in comfort and style. When you live in 706 square feet you don’t need much to run it; he collects water from his roof, power from the sun and wind, heat from sustainably cut wood. He spends about six hundred bucks a year for his propane barbeque, gas for his chainsaw and log splitter and that is about it.” (Text by Treehugger, Yurt image by Bill Janis)

Update!

Supertramp’s Bicycle Caravan

Via Twitter GoldenGus has pointed me to a really cool, alternative use of small space. “Jacob aka ‘Supertramp’ is embarking on a voyage around London exploring the concept of micro-sized living; inspired by a more minimal, fluid and socially aware approach to future living, the project seeks to promote and inspire leaner, more livable life forms … His new mobile house doubles up as an agency and a social facility point, offering a unique, intimate and conversational platform where people will both inspire and be inspired.” For more on this project visit Nell Osbourne on Posterous (which is also where the image is from).

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Why are the East of Cities usually Poorer?

By Dan Zambonini, May 31, 2010, 1:10 am in Architecture, Culture, History, Past

Smoke / Pollution

Many older cities rapidly expanded during the Industrial Revolution, as workers flocked to the urban centers. As the towns and cities expanded, the residential areas for the workers tended to be in the east, with the middle and upper-classes in the west.

The reason for this is that in much of the northern hemisphere, the prevailing winds are westerlies – blowing from west to east. The massive, unchecked pollution from these early industries would therefore drift eastward, making the air quality much lower in the east end of cities, lowering the desirability (and price) of the housing. Middle classes preferred the cleaner west ends.

The issue was probably even pre-Industrial Revolution, as smoke from personal chimneys would still have caused problems to the east.

In many cities, this will have been compounded – or confused – by the direction of the main river in the environment, which would have been relied on for many uses, including sewerage. London, as an example, displays a massive east/west divide, caused in large part by both early industry and the west-to-east flow of the River Thames.

Smoke image under Creative Commons license, by Flickr user Señor Codo

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London Shop Fronts

By Sian Prescott, March 21, 2010, 9:56 pm in Architecture, Art, Design, Past, Photography
£1 Shop - Image by Emily Webber

Image by Emily Webber

London-based photographer Emily Webber has amassed a fascinating on-going portfolio of images of various shop fronts in London.

There is something so intriguing about these images, about the independent shops and businesses that are shown. So simple in concept, so layered under the surface. In a world which is dominated by big business and brands, the photographs seem to portray a dying world, a retro signed-existence that is too often forgotten or ignored. And like many urban photographical studies, it raises many questions about society. What does it tell us about our city life? What is the future for such a way of life? There’s chaos and grime, systematic of the city.

The collections are also a captivating look at various sign designs – graphics and typography, shop names from the random, to the ‘puntastic’, to the banal. From the american style to the classic italics. It’s like a life-size photoshop font collection of the present and yet also the past.

Beautiful. Melancholic. Urban. Dying. And yet, somehow, very much alive.

Image by Emily Webber. The London Shop Fronts web site.

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