Stefan Wehrmeyer’s lovely map of nightbus journey times in London.
This has gone extremely viral already but anyway, nuclear explosions 1945-1998. Hard to believe there’s any Arizona desert left.
Stephen Walter’s amazingly detailed London Island.
Using flickr tags to derive subjective neighbourhood boundaries.
Lovely map of London bike hire availability.
Here’s a set of maps from the NY Times, showing Netflix rental habits in various US cities. Note the east-west divide in Washington DC, the popularity of Milk in San Francisco, and Mad Men in Manhattan. It’s an interesting way to look at cultural consumption in relation to social geography, and makes me wonder what else can be learned from mail-order shopping.
Awesome. Yersinia Pestis has photographed all the old WW2 bomb damage maps from the London County Council archives, transferred them to flickr, and made this nifty Google map marking some but not all of the strike sites. It’s like Web 2.0 but useful.
View V2 rockets on London in a larger map
Apart from telling a story of great human tragedy, the pattern of these bomb strikes persists in London’s idiosyncratic urban mix to this day, in that the sites were very frequently used for the construction of social housing estates in the post-war decades. Some of these estates have suffered from poor design, construction or management ever since, and social housing in general has become more ‘residualised’ as access has been rationed to the most needy cases. Combine that with the fact that the bombers generally tried to target the kind of areas of heavy manufacturing that have also suffered the worst job losses since the war, and you have a lot of places that stand out as pockets of lasting deprivation, more than 60 years after the bombs hit.
Update: Coincidentally, a new edition of Phyllis Pearsal’s original London A to Z from 1936 has just been published, and there’s an accompanying online map viewer which enables you to see some of the areas that suffered during the war, such as the stretch between Moorgate and Long Lane now occupied by the Barbican centre.
This painstakingly crafted isometric portrait of Lower-to-Mid Manhattan is pretty amazing. It turns out such a stylised representation actually gives you a much clearer sense of the shape of each building and of the area as a whole - when you’re in the middle of it you can get this sense of an almost endless forest of towers but large swathes are ‘only’ medium-rise. Also, having been brought up on isometric ‘God-games’ like Civilization and SimCity my immediate instinct when presented with this kind of picture is to look for areas to demolish and replace with vast monuments to my greatness. Nice knowing you, Lower East Side! I’m starting to understand how Robert Moses might have felt …
It’s made by the same Chinese company that did similar maps for Hong Kong, Shanghai and others. I’m curious as to whether there is some automated way of creating these maps or whether they’ve got hundreds of pixel-artists slaving away in some graphic-design sweatshop.
Oh my. Google’s automatic face-blurring technology might have got a bit over-zealous:
Unfortunately they’ve fixed it now. Thanks to Google Sightseeing for the spot.
Here’s my local pub, as photographed by Google with a camera on a stick on a car:
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They’ve done the whole of London, and more besides.
Here’s the car they used, reflected in a window on Holloway Road - a more inconspicuous vehicle than used elsewhere.
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I reckon it’ll provide freesheet fodder for weeks to come: the photos are so detailed tons of people will be able to recognise themselves or others, even with the face blurring on, and there’ll be no end of ‘Is this you?’ emails flying about. Sometimes the blurring seems to miss completely, such as this fellow on Bishopsgate:
I suggest some sort of ‘Streetview Bingo’, where people get points for spotting Boris Johnson breaking a red light, Pete Doherty asleep in a doorway, etc.
Among the people who might be slightly concerned about their privacy are my next door neighbours:
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I’m guessing it was largely done on a Saturday morning, judging by the weather and crowds. Here’s Piccadilly Circus:
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And here’s a pretty good view of Westminster Bridge:
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Vastly more to follow, I’m sure.
Lots of interesting map-related stuff around recently.
Ooh, The Onion have published an atlas. From one of the sample pages:
Home to Earth’s entire population of 62.7 million people, every single one of the planet’s 427 cities, and all of it’s history, culture and beauty, France is the only country in the world.
This one’s for Conor, who’s going to be there soon enough: strange maps has a great map panorama and lots of wonderful detail about the San Francisco quake and fire of 1906.
The quake lasted 42 seconds, causing severe damage. Ruptured gas lines (and the scarcity of water due to ruptures in those lines) caused city-wide fires that eventually were responsible for up to 90% of the total destruction. Additionally, since the insurance companies didn’t refund the actual quake damage, many people set fire to their own homes. The fires raged for four days and nights. By that time, 80% of the city was destroyed. Estimates of the damage range from $500 million to as high as $1 billion (equivalent to as much as $300 billion in 2005 money).
The army was brought in to control the fires (which they did with dynamite and even artillery barrages) and stop the looting. In all, 500 presumed looters were shot. Some destruction and loss of life occurred outside San Francisco, but the bulk of the 3.000 casualties were to be regretted in the Golden Gate city itself. Three quarters of its population of 400.000 were made homeless. Half of those fled across the Bay to Oakland and Berkeley, others took up residence in massive camps of shacks and tents at Golden Gate Park and the Presidio, among other places.
Some of those camps were still open in 1908, indicating the slowness of the rebuilding effort (the city wouldn’t be considered ‘rebuilt’ until the Exposition of 1915). Up until then, San Francisco had been the undisputed economic centre of the West Coast. Los Angeles profited from the diversion of trade, industry and population, and eventually overtook its rival to the north.
Here’s a map showing the general distribution of poverty and wealth in the area around my home in Lowman Road in 1898-99, when Charles Booth carried out his pioneering Inquiry into the Life and Labour of the People in London.
Lowman Road’s on the left, and judging by the key was ‘fairly comfortable’ at the time, as I think it is now. Note also the concentration of ‘vicious, semi-criminal’ types in the bottom right of the map, which happens to be where the Arsenal stadium is now, further proof that some things never change.
This is very nicely done. It derives a ‘walkability’ score for your address based on proximity of shops, services and amenities.
It’s obviously not perfect - it can’t handle Irish addresses (but that’s your own fault for not having a proper addressing system), and it doesn’t adjust for street accessibility or the ‘quality’ of each feature - but still, it’s a good idea and well executed.
And while I don’t think anyone’s going to make a home purchase decision on the basis of minor differences in Walk Scores, the scores for places I’ve lived are roughly about what I’d expect: Lowman Road is certainly closer to the action than Dresden Road. Bill Gates, on the other hand, has clearly blundered big time in choosing such an out of the way spot to live.
This seems like a good idea:
Hey all,
I’m a daily user of Dublin Bus but I usually only take the same three bus routes into and out of town. So while I know those routes backwards, when it comes to going to any location I’m not sure what bus to take.
The Dublin Bus website isn’t great at giving the exact route of the bus. It might say the bus goes to A then B and then C but doesn’t say how exactly it gets from A to B. So I’m not sure what stop to get off in order to bring me closest to my destination.
But now that Google Maps have launched their My Map service, this could change. I think it’s possible to use this service to map out every Dublin Bus route and stops.
Shouldn’t really be necessary, but they’re right, the DB website gives information about routes but for some reason not in the form of lines on maps. And Google’s My Map is apparently very easy to use.
Best blog ever?. I especially love the Most Generic Country.
I’ve uploaded a bit of a Flann O’Brien rarity as a picture on Flickr: it’s a map of “An Domhan Mór” drawn by Seán O Sullivan for An Béal Bocht (but not included in its translation as The Poor Mouth, apparently) which I think I scanned from UCD Library’s copy about ten years ago. It’s a great illustration of the unique world-view Flann / Myles was describing in the book, with Chorca Dorcha pretty big, Sligo Jail a prominent landmark and special care taken to describe the location of money order offices, poteen deposits, the Buoys of Wexford, and George Bernard Shaw. The far-flung Gaelic diaspora is also well represented in its two principle homes, De Odar Saighd and Thar Lear.
Simple, but powerful: if you sign up to support this Australian climate change campaign, they put a little dot representing you on a map of the country. Doesn’t sound like much, but I think it’s a really effective visualisation, because:
I reckon Oxfam should do something like this with their “I’m in” campaign. Actually, I reckon they should drop it because it’s a terrible slogan and a wanky idea, but failing that, nifty visuals might help make it marginally less offensive.
Ghostcyle
“There are thousands of active cyclists in London, and facilities are gradually improving in most boroughs of the capital. The aim of this project is to identify and make visible accident spots around the city, as well as attempting to collate some form of statistical information regarding bicycle accidents.”
The Organic City
“The Organic City is a community storytelling project focused on the downtown Oakland areas surrounding Lake Merritt. We encourage you to
find and tell stories about local places through this website. These stories form the basis for mobile media that can be experienced while walking around the city”.
German ReggaeMap
It does exactly what it says on the tin.
Isledon, Ysendon, Isendune, Yseldon, Eyseldon … For hundreds of years the neighbourhood we now know and love as Islington was either so obscure or such a zany party town that nobody could agree what it was even called, according to this local church history site.
And this panoramic map of how Islington might have looked in Elizabethan times is rather good:
That’s St Mary’s Church on ‘The Upper Street’ circled (’The Lower Street’, now Essex Road, is on the right). Comparing with this fairly similar view from Google Earth, I think a few of the big inn-like buildings from the old map correspond to the sites of some of the area’s oldest pubs - obviously they go back a long way.
This is quite cool, though perhaps not for the reasons they think:
Put very simply, Bikely helps cyclists share knowledge of good bicycle routes.
It can be quite tricky traversing a car dominated city by bicycle, particularly when you need to travel an unknown route to a new destination.
But the chances are, someone has cycled that way before you. Bikely makes it easy for him or her to show you the best way
I dunno, people’s routes tend to be very specific - they’ll need a lot of routes submitted before someone really logs on to find exactly the right route across Hamburg they needed, for example. I suppose if it takes off they might manage it, but in the meantime it’s fun just plotting out your own routes (here’s my commute to work, here’s someone else’s swing round Donnybrook and Killiney), plus you can view them in Google Earth (by saving as a .gpx file) and, which I found just as nifty as Tom, you can view a cross-section which shows you the change in elevation along the route. How long before someone plots the entire route of the next Tour de France?
I’ve been meaning to post for ages about Google Earth and just how amazing it is. Well, it’s about to become even better, at least for the likes of me, because these boffins have gone and created a 3D map showing every building in London to a fairly remarkable level of detail (it’s all done using LIDAR, apparently). As it happens, some of the people working on this do so two floors above my desk, so naturally I pestered them into giving me a demo. It looks fantastic, as this video clip demonstrates. Unfortunately I think the final version might only be available to the public sector, but as that technically includes me I won’t complain too much.
The obvious next question is how long it’ll be before some enterprising hacker knocks something up allowing you to fly planes into 3D buildings within GE, and some enterprising tabloid hack starts a moral panic about it providing free training to terrorist.
Are there any really lost arts, creative techniques that nobody can really master any more? Dunno, but I nominate the panoramic map. There is a fantastic online collection of around 1,500 such maps (no Wildwood, New Jersey, sadly) from 19th and early 20th Century America hosted by the Library of Congress here, and it’s really worth exploring. These maps are not just beautiful, they’re historically invaluable because they provide a precise snapshot of each town’s development, detailed down to the architecture of each building, the trees in each field, the smoke puffing from trains rolling into town and the horseback carriages trundling through the streets, so that you get a picture not just of the layout but the character and activity of a place. It’s amazing to me that this map of Los Angeles in 1909 is nearly 100 years old yet does a better job of telling you about the city than anything since then except, maybe, Google Earth in the last year or so:
For reference, here’s pretty much the same view in Google Earth:
Okay, you can fly around the Google Earth view, but you don’t have to fly around the map.
Some of the maps really are gorgeous. I really like Albert Ruger’s style, which combines precision with a slightly weird child-like quality so his towns feel like perfect settings for Tim Burton films. Like this detail from Decatur:
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The biggest panoramic map created was the 200 square foot Pictorial St. Louis of St. Louis, which shows the entire city down to this level of detail:
There’s a potted history of panoramic maps in the US here, and while we’re at it here’s a fun panoramic of China by Hokusai from 1840.
Check out the fantastic series of globes made by Ingo Günther at WorldProcessor. A few of my favourites: car populations, Nuclear Powers and Shadow States, forest fires and migration to New York City.
During my weekly Ghostbusters webcrawl, I came across this really cool (I typed ‘gool’ there by accident, which makes sense, actually) Googlemaps Ghostbusters guide to New York.
Sarajevo Survival Map 92-96 is the ultimate visual document, a Topography of Life and Death. It is the only Map in the world that has made a visual reference to the tragedy of a besieged European city at the end of 20th century. Representing a successful combination of it’s hand-drawn illustration quality, topographic precision, text legends and true portray of the siege elements, such are; number and types of guns surrounding the city, the anti-sniper protection barricades, water sources, a secret underground tunnel, survival gardens, sniping zones and other key strategic urban elements. Serving as a document on the Historical level, an event of true value on a Cultural level, and on a Political level a powerful lesson for all of us.
I think this is an amazing piece of work - comprehensive and informative, but also very dramatic and quite disturbing in its detail and slightly child-like quality. And each landmark has its own story:
THE TUNNEL
The Dobrinja-Butmir tunnel, a hole some 1.2 meters wide, 1.6 meters high and 760 meters long, is situated under the Sarajevo airport runway. In the official communication between local politicians and UNPROFOR this public secret has been referred to as “the non-existent tunnel”. Foreigners were not allowed into the tunnel and journalists were offering up to 5.000 DM for just one shot of the tunnel.
Although the tunnel was a military object and intended solely for the army’s getting in and out of town, the privilege of using it was extended to the American ambassador to Bosnia and Herzegovina, Viktor Jakovic, who the aggressor did not allow to leave the city by plane. The tunnel was also used to get the members of Parliament from other towns into the city. Many of them were easily recognized during the sessions of Parliament because they had bruises on their foreheads from hitting the iron support bars within the tunnel. Some comfort was extended to the most respected politicians who were pushed through the tunnel in small wagons.
The commercialization of the tunnel brought about great changes in the economic life of the city. The tunnel became a place full of people dragging bags with potatoes o eggs. Many tradesmen were allowed to “rent” the tunnel from the army. Thanks to the tunnel many became rich, but the prices also fell within the city.
The aggressor also knew about the secret tunnel and by continuously shelling its entrance it hampered its usage. They even tried to dig another tunnel of the other side of the airport in order to redirect the Zeljeznica river and flood the tunnel.
In spite of everything the hole under the airport became the greatest public good of the city and its only link with the rest of the world. If one managed to get a permit to go through the tunnel he or she would be greeted at the exit by a marker-written sign: PARIS 3765km.
The map was created by FAMA, a Sarajevo-based media and publishing group.
Link from Cartography.
1. OpenStreetMap poster
“What it shows: Data submitted to OpenStreetMap of people walking, driving and cycling around London. So the thicker the lines, the more people travelled them.”
2. Travel Time Tube Map
“Select a station to see the London Underground map reorganise around the times of travel from that station.”
3. Greenwich Emotion Map
“The project is set up as a series of participatory workshops that invite people to borrow a Bio Mapping device and go for a walk. The device measures the wearer’s Galvanic Skin Response (GSR), which is an indicator of emotional arousal in conjunction with their geographical location. The resulting maps encourage personal reflection on the complex relationship between us, our environment and our fellow citizens. By sharing this information we can construct maps that visualise where we as a community feel stressed and excited.”
Thanks to Tom Carden for the links (he’s also responsible for the first two maps).
This is quite cool - a website that shows you the distribution of people with your surname in Britain in 1881 and in 1998. The 1881 distributions are a lot more interesting because they’re more regionally concentrated, with a much more diffuse pattern in 1998. Here’s the distribution of Gleesons in 1881, and here are the Gibneys, Caulfields, Ryans, Geoghegans, and Gannons (sorry, no Tonras).
Most Irish names were clustered around Liverpool, Western Scotland or London in 1881, unsurprisingly enough. The non-Irish names I tried were each quite different - here’s Stephenson, Myles, Bell, Ansell and Fielding.
These pages give even more information, such as how many of you there are overseas - apparently Australia has shedloads of Gleesons, I wonder why. It also tells you “% of people with a more high-status name”, which tells me that “Gentleman” Jim Ansell has the highest-status name out of all those I tried, with only 12% posher. He hides it well.
Behold the solution to the Tube’s funding problem - sponsored stations!
They’ve obviously run out of inspiration in spots (Dovewark?) but some of it is genius, like the simple replacement of ‘Finchley’ with ‘Crunchie’. Now I’m off to Habitattenham Court Road …
PS Loads more silly Tube maps here - and thanks to Justin for the link.
I am trying to stop posting exclusively about maps, but there’s just too many geekishly fascinating examples out there. Like this Hypermedia Berlin thing, which has lots of nice zoomable, clickable, interactiveable maps of Berlin going back through the years all the way to, crazily, 1237. See below (to give ex-Berliners an idea of the scale, that’s ‘Spandow’ on the far-left):
Warning, it might take a long time to load on a slow computer.
Speaking of which, here’s A Literary Map of Manhattan: Where imaginary New Yorkers lived, worked, played, drank, walked and looked at ducks.
Michael Baldwin is doing some fascinating work at Commoncensus.org to map the cultural or personal borders of communities in America, as opposed to the political or admininstrative. He simply asks people what they consider to be their local area, and using their physical location aggregates the answers up into maps like this (click to go to the site proper):
There’s variations on the theme, too, like the Manhattan Neighbourhood Map and, ingeniously, maps of sports team fan areas. Reading all this, I thought it would be interesting to ask people whether they identified themselves primarily in terms of their local community, or their state, or their country, but of course he’s already done that too.
It’ll be great to see how these maps develop as they fill up with more entrants. Also, I’d love to see the patterns of affinities this method produces for Ireland and England - according to the FAQ Michael intends to extend coverage to Europe, and has already been repeatedly pestered by English football fans presumably wishing to establish beyond doubt that all Manchester United fans come from London.
