Mrs P's A-Z Map Man

Picture yourself on a winter's evening in London.

You're trying to find your way to the nearest underground station,

the smog is swirling around and half the street names aren't on your map.

That's what it was like in the 1930s if you didn't know London well.

Then this came along, the A to Z Street Atlas of London.

Cheap, comprehensive, essential to urban survival.

Created in 1936 by a determined woman called Phyllis Pearsall, it transformed travel in the capital.

Since then, millions of copies have flown off the shelves.

Today I'll bet you can find one of these in every home and business in London.

How many appointments would I have missed but for this map?

It's been a real life-saver.

But what I want to know is who is it for?

Is it the ultimate street map, and why is it that some roads marked on it don't actually exist?

Say, that's a swell map!

For many people, Phyllis Pearsall's A to Z is the very definition of a map.

It's an extremely practical guide to London.

Every street is marked, the lettering is spread out to give an idea of the street's length,

there are house numbers, and all the major landmarks are clearly on display.

You simply can't go wrong.

Abbeville Road, SW4, the very first street name in the very first A to Z.

I'm going to make a journey the whole way from Clapham here

in south London to Upper Holloway in north London, to be precise, to 2H,

page 49, Zoffany Street, the very last name in Phyllis Pearsall's A to Z of 1936.

On the way I'm going to try and find out whether the A to Z is completely

accurate, if it's good design, and who gets the most out of it.

Phyllis Pearsall, Mrs P as her employees came to know her,

was born in Dulwich, south London, in 1906.

She grew up wanting to be a painter and she studied art history at the Sorbonne in Paris.

But it was when she returned to London in the mid-1930s that she spotted a

golden opportunity to transform her fellow Londoners' lives.

What Mrs P realised was that the available maps were basically, well, rubbish.

She found herself getting lost on the way to dinner parties.

The problem was that these maps were based on Ordnance Survey mapping from 1919.

The lettering was too small to read, not all the streets were mapped, and if you wanted number 17

you'd no idea which end of the street to start.

And London was changing rapidly, so in 1935 Phyllis Pearsall decided to set things straight.

Her plan was simple.

From five in the morning until eleven at night

she would walk around London, noting down the names and positions of every one of the capital's streets.

In the process she found herself uncovering the very roots of London,

the oldest streets, evoking a past when London was very different.

History frozen in street names.

Nothing survives of rural London except memories held in a handful of street names.

Milk Street, Carter Lane, up there where carts once rolled, from Addle Hill, right here. "Addle"

comes from the Old English word "addler", meaning "stinking urine", or "eddle", meaning "liquid manure".

So Addle Hill was the hill of cow dung.

On the way to the Stock Exchange, watch your step.

It took her about a year of surveying to cover the 23,000 streets London then had.

In all, she walked over 3,000 miles, a monumental task.

So what on earth motivated her to do it?

It surely can't have been as simple as getting lost on the way to dinner parties.

Sarah Hartley is Mrs P's biographer.

She had an incredibly

challenging personal life.

She's just seen her mother die in Bedlam

in the most terrible circumstances.

Her father was actually a map maker himself.

He set up one of the biggest map-making companies in London, Geographia.

He'd walked out on the family.

He was a tyrant, he was a bully.

Despite his behaviour, Phyllis adored him and wanted to prove that she could impress him.

But she also had difficulties in her own marriage.

She'd walked out on her husband, a fellow artist, in Venice.

She'd come back to London, she was on her own in a bedsit, and she decided, "This is what I'm going to do."

"I'm going to take my father on at his own game."

How quickly did the business take off?

She went to WH Smith

and she waited to see the buyer for at least...

It was about five days she'd keep going back and forth.

And in the end the buyer said, "Who's this woman?"

"Who's this secretary that's haunting the place?"

And she went in to see him with this humble little book and said, "Well, it's my own work.

"I'm sorry about the bled edges.

"It's not as great as it could be."

I think he was so impressed he ordered 25 copies there and then.

She went back to her bedsit and took a wheelbarrow from the pub next door

and delivered her copies to WH Smith.

70 years on, the A to Z is Britain's bestselling atlas.

But how good IS it for getting around the complexities of the capital?

My journey is going to take me all over this great city.

Right now I'm on my way to London's Docklands, a place where the old

street names sit alongside dozens of brand-new ones.

This is Canary Wharf, one of the newest

areas of expanding London, a city which now covers 610 square miles.

When Mrs P set off each morning, her surveying kit was pretty basic.

I've got my apple, I've got my kicked-in map bag, so I'm ready to conduct my own Mrs P-style audit.

I'm going to check out a route from Canada Square

through the old docklands area to Billingsgate fish market and a place called Blackwall Basin, then down

Preston's Road and Manchester Road, and finally out to the River Thames.

The problem I've got is that this part of the city is a multilayered

and ever-changing labyrinth of tower blocks and cul-de-sacs.

London round here is much more massive than the A to Z suggests,

but so far so good in terms of street plan.

Now, if I look up as I walk along here I should see the edge of

the Millennium Dome. And there it is.

The one thing the A to Z can't map is volume, and cities are full of volume.

Just look around Canary Wharf.

These immensely tall buildings can't be shown on a map that's two-dimensional.

Down there, there's a road called East Road running along

above the water, but there's another walkway directly underneath it, and the lower walkway can't be shown.

All you can see is a single layer of the city.

So it is a limitation of a two-dimensional map like the A to Z.

Just coming out of Churchill Place, and according to the A to Z

I should be able to see Billingsgate fish market over on the left. There it is.

This roundabout ahead of me should be water, but I can't see it.

If the A to Z's right, Blackwall Basin should be over there.

These maps may not show you all the different levels of London...

..but what the A to Z can do is produce wonderful surprises, and this is one of them.

I'm only a couple of hundred metres from the tallest buildings in Canary Wharf,

and I've suddenly been confronted by a scene of utter tranquillity.

Over there is a row of beautiful painted houseboats, below me are the serene waters of Blackwall Basin,

behind it a rather grubby Millennium Dome, and over on the right here a lovely area of undeveloped land,

a green space that hasn't been covered in £1 million flats.

Now, I should be able to walk from here

eastwards down to the shores of the River Thames.

But I've got to get down here first.

Every night Mrs P took her sketches home to her flat in Horseferry Road

and hid them under her bed.

Then, when she'd finished one part of London, she sent

her notebooks to her father's most trusted draughtsman, Mr Fountain,

and he set about transforming them into maps.

As soon as I get round this corner I should be able to see

Preston Road dead ahead. That looks like it.

It's so adaptable, the A to Z.

The streets I've been walking along are new, built over what were once docks.

Preston's Road, though, is over a century old.

The A to Z makes it all look completely seamless.

Here's the roundabout on Preston's Road.

There's Marsh Wall, that's East Ferry Road, so this must be Manchester Road.

And it is. There's the sign.

Just up Manchester Road, on the left, must be Stewart Street.

Under Mrs P's direction, Mr Fountain broke with mapping tradition.

He widened each street and then spread the name along its entire length.

The A to Z revolutionised the image of the capital.

Streets - and street names - had never looked so clear.

Brilliant. I've been walking for half an hour, and the A to Z has led me the whole way

from the heart of Canary Wharf down to the banks of the River Thames.

Every street was in the right place and it was correctly named.

It's a remarkable testament to one visionary woman and an awful lot of legwork.

So, the A to Z won't generally get you lost.

But what sort of picture of London does it give?

Does it provide enough information?

Is it pleasing to look at?

Do people like using it?

It's a map entirely focused on streets, on how to get about.

The size of parks, whether an area is busy or peaceful, is there a pub on the corner?

It gives you none of those things.

So how good a design is it?

It's not a masterpiece of modern design

in that amazingly funky graphics, but it's a masterpiece in the more important way.

One of my definitions of good design is "the ordinary thing done extraordinarily well."

You buy this for London, Birmingham, Manchester,

it doesn't matter where, and you feel you possess the city.

There's a compulsion to own A to Zs, and people buy more than are functionally necessary.

You don't just have one A to Z, in my experience people have lots and lots and lots.

One of the great things about modern design is it made quality democratic.

And with the A to Z there's no way of distinguishing Hackney Marshes from Kensington Gardens.

And I love little details like this.

There's the arbitrary announcement of offices somewhere down here.

There are offices everywhere else, but they're not

indicated, but offices here. A bowling alley there.

When you get used to living with the A to Z, and any city dweller does, it's the way the roads dominate.

In fact, looking at the A to Z of London, the roads...

Jamaica Street is given far more prominence than the Tower of London.

It does suggest that movement is a human priority.

It's not about settlements, it's not about the analysis of districts,

it's about how parts of a huge, heaving metropolis are connected to each other by these roads.

And it's beautifully drawn - Blackwall Tunnel flyover here.

And it suggests a dynamism which, of course, is a bit of a deceit,

as those of us who have been stuck in the Blackwall Tunnel Approach know too many times.

But, you know, as I said, it's a work of art, because it presents an ideal view of the city, not a real one.

Question - if a cabbie doesn't know the street you've asked to be taken to, what does he do?

Answer - he takes a crafty look in the A to Z.

Hello. Dahomey Road, please.

The A to Z is the foundation of the Knowledge, the vast collection

of streets and routes, an area roughly equivalent to

a six-mile radius of Charing Cross, which all 21,000 London cab drivers have had to learn by heart.

Malcolm Linskey runs a leading Knowledge school in north London,

where new recruits fill their brains with hundreds of street names.

..leaving the right at Salamanca Street, right out of Embankment,

comply Lambeth Circus, leave by Lambeth Bridge, comply Millbank Circus, leave at Horseferry Road...

I'm very fond of the A to Z, primarily because you see what you get.

The street layout on it is as is on the street. Other maps are around.

They have their own virtues, but nothing as clear cut and as precise as the A to Z.

And how many streets are there within the six-mile radius?

I'm not sure whether anybody's actually counted them, but we estimate about 17,000.

..left Greycoat Place, right Artillery Row, Buckingham Gate,

left and comply Queen Victoria Memorial, leave by the Mall, left onto Marlborough Road...

Would you say cabbies have a different kind of brain,

a brain that can absorb all of this cartographic information?

There is a theory that there's a part of the brain called the

hippocampus and it actually expands to absorb all this information.

And apparently, with cab drivers, they tend to have a big hippocampus.

No-one's quite sure whether they start off with big hippocampuses

or it develops because of their Knowledge training.

..forward over Marlborough Street, left Stafford Street, right Dover Street, left Hay Hill, right

Berkeley Street, right Berkeley Square, leave by Davies Street...

There is a saying on the Knowledge - if you get into trouble

-using the backstreets, resort to your oranges and lemons.

-What's that mean?

Well, if you look at the map you'll see that all the primary roads are coloured orange or lemon,

so in other words if you're in trouble with your Knowledge, the way out of jowl is to use the main roads,

which are colour-coded orange and lemon on this.

So it's part of the Knowledge lingo, if you like.

..right onto Park Street, forward into Portman Street,

forward Portman Square, forward Gloucester Place, bear left Park Road, right St John's Wood Circus,

leave by Wellington Road, forward Finchley Road...

Cabbies aren't the only ones concerned about getting

to exactly the right place with the minimum of delay.

The emergency services rely on the A to Z to get them through when they're responding to a 999 call.

Mrs P had an early reminder of the importance of diligent map making.

A doctor claimed that one of his patients had died

after he'd gone to the wrong address due to an error in the A to Z.

In fact, he'd just looked it up incorrectly, but the point went home with Mrs P, and thereafter

she impressed upon her staff that lives depended upon them.

How effective is the A to Z as a guide when you have to get

to your destination or call-out address as fast as possible?

-Does it work?

-Very effective.

You can identify tiny roads.

A lot of blocks of flats are actually named on the A to Z, as well, which is quite handy.

What about the house numbers being in there too? Does that help, knowing which end of the...?

I use the house number. And also, when you get the job in the MDT, because the house numbers are

there, the triangle would actually be approximately where that number is.

But I always use the numbers, especially on a long road.

You don't want to be spending half an hour going up and down it.

-Amy, have you been drinking tonight, then?

-Yeah.

Yeah? How much have you had, roughly?

'I think the A to Z's excellent.'

I've got one in my car and I use it all the time.

But no, it's a good mapping system.

So thanks to a combination of GPS and the A to Z, Amy is rushing off

to hospital within minutes of the 999 call being made.

Today a copy of the A to Z is as vital a piece of life-saving kit as a respirator or a shot of Adrenalin.

Unless, of course, you're a courier.

Alpha 44.

Alpha 44, go ahead.

Brand-new day, brand-new problem.

Couriers depend on the A to Z to deliver their packages,

so I'm wondering what happens when the address a courier wants goes missing.

It's 8.30 in the morning, and I'm on courier duty.

I've got my walkie-talkie, my A to Z and a very fetching cycling jersey!

All I've got to do now is collect my package.

Well I have my destination, Cassilis Road, E14.

Now I must look it up in the index of my A to Z, Cassilis Road.

We have a problem because the only Cassilis Road is in TW1, that's Twickenham, there's not

much point taking my package there so I'm off to E14, the Isle of Dogs,

and I'm going to have to use my navigational nous.

I'm in E14, so I'm in the right bit of London, but there's absolutely no sign of Cassilis Road,

so I'm going to have to do what people did before the A to Z was invented, which is to ask the way.

I'm trying to reach you with a package but you're not on the A to Z, can you tell me where you are?

Off Lightermans Road?

OK, thanks a lot.

Cheers, bye.

So it does exist.

It looks brand new, a new road, new buildings.

The A to Z have always relied on the public to keep them up to date with new roads.

In fact there was a time when they offered a small monetary reward.

Clearly Cassilis Road needs to be on the London map,

so I'm going to contact the A to Z to see if I can make that happen.

Might make a few quid.

Well I phoned the A to Z and while I wait for them to get here

I'm going to check out exactly where Cassilis Road goes.

Cassilis Road ends right here, no doubt about that,

but there's a paved road going on in this direction.

Question is, what's this called?

Broadway Walk.

Broadway Walk, in the A to Z.

There is a short stub of road running off Alpha Grove.

That's Alpha Grove just there.

The stub's in the right place but it's called

Bartlett Place. I could understand how Cassilis Road could have sprung from nowhere because there's been

so much development in this part of London over the last 25 years, but what on earth is going on here?

On the ground we've got Broadway Walk but on the map we've got Bartlett Place. Very puzzling.

A to Z team to the rescue.

And about time.

John Frankel is the managing director of Geographers' A to Z Map Company.

He has worked with them for 43 years.

Kieron Bartlett's only done 10, a youngster!

-The GPS unit up on the roof is plugged into the laptop here so if I bring the GPS in

-...

That's a global positioning satellite.

That's right.

So this van's connected to satellite and it's going to plot the line of the road.

That's right. I've got green signals where the dots have kicked in here.

I was just turning into the beginning of Cassilis Road.

It's very exciting, we're about go into unmapped territory.

Your red dots will trace out the new line of Cassilis Road.

What I'm going to do now is draw a line over the top so when we take it back we know the route of the road.

-So you're tracing a very fine line on top of the red dots.

-Yes.

That's just a guide that you can turn into a proper road pair of lines back at headquarters, is it?

-That's right.

-We've got the raw data and I hope we can work out the mystery of Bartlett Place.

No mention, incidentally, of any payment for my efforts.

All that's required now is a trip to A to Z's Kent headquarters.

Mrs P moved the company to Borough Green in 1992.

She came to love the place so much she had her ashes buried there.

Was Mrs P a ruthless business woman or a kind auntie?

What was she like as a person to work with?

She saw herself in the sporting sense as the wicketkeeper.

If we ever needed her, she would always be there.

She was also a very kind person and cared very much about the people that worked with A to Z.

It's a trust company.

She was very concerned that on her death the company would be sold so in

1966 she actually gave the shares to the company and the trust was formed.

What would you have done if we hadn't told you that Cassilis Road existed?

-We would have found it.

-Are you sure?

I'm sure because we visit the area.

So Mapman's helped you to update your map.

In this case, yes.

Are you trying to get the sides of the road to run parallel with our single red line?

Yes, because we need to put text inside the road so the road needs to be slightly

wider than the road that actually exists.

You're exaggerating the width of the road to fit the lettering.

Exactly. If I hit here, I'll make the edges of the roads.

Wow, there it is.

Now I need to put the text in, turn it on its side.

You haven't got much space to put the street names in, have you?

No. This is a particularly congested part of London.

When we put our text out we tend to put it

each letter at a time to make sure it's easy to read and it looks good.

-Quite painstaking, isn't it?

-It takes a long time.

What are you going to do about Bartlett Place down the bottom there?

On the street itself it's called Broadway Walk.

Is that an error?

It was obviously an error on our behalf.

We used to show it as Bartlett Place.

-Why was that?

-In this case, it's not an error.

It's one of our phantom names.

-A what name?

-A phantom name.

-A phantom name?

-A phantom name, yes.

These names are included on our mapping to protect our copyright.

So if you had found somebody who had mapped that part of the Isle of Dogs with a place

called Bartlett Place on there, you'd know they'd copied your map?

-Yes, cos it's unique to our mapping.

-It's a trick feature?

In this case, the name is actually named after Kieron.

-Kieron Bartlett?

-Yes.

-You're cheeky.

You've named a road after yourself?

It wasn't actually me who put the road in. I didn't choose the name.

Nothing to do with you at all?

-No.

-How many of these phantoms streets are there in London?

-Probably just over 100.

-100?!

About 100. But we try to put them in areas where they don't actually interfere with people's navigation.

It interfered with my navigation.

I went through major grief trying to work out what was going on.

I was standing in front of Broadway Walk being told by you that it was Bartlett Place.

We can only apologise on this occasion!

Could be quite a new urban sport, pinning down phantom place names.

It's a big place, though.

-Is this it?

-This will be the finished plot.

I can't believe this is the latest map of the Isle of Dogs.

This is the latest A-Z.

Mm, the smell of a new map.

That's brilliant. And here we have Cassilis Road.

So the blank space in E14 has been filled.

Cassilis Road is on the map and the phantom Bartlett Place is now the real Broadway Walk.

Last day, one last place to visit.

Zoffany Street, the final street, the ultimate Z.

Here it is - a charming little Victorian street built in 1887

and named after an 18th-century Czech painter called Johann Zoffany.

Mrs P would have loved that.

Painting was always one of her great passions.

These days, there are A-Z maps of over 200 towns across the country.

But London remains the best seller.

In various formats, more than 200,000 are sold every year.

Other street maps are now available, but they all owe a debt to Mrs P's people's map.

By the time she died in 1996, London had 50,000 streets, twice the number

it had in 1936, and Phyllis Pearsall is celebrated as being the founder of the London street guide.

It has saved lives and it presents itself as a golden thread in and out of London's labyrinth.

Right now, for me today, it's got one last job to do - to lead me to 7D, page 48, home.

Subtitles by BBC Broadcast - 2005

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