Gallery › London
Map of London
London has no plan: it has a river. The Thames comes in from the west, bends into an S, and the city has been settling into its curves for two thousand years.
What you see on the map
The Thames. The great curve that crosses the map from side to side, with its bridges one after another: Westminster, Waterloo, Blackfriars, the Millennium, London Bridge and, to the east, Tower Bridge.
Westminster and the City. The city's two poles. To the west, parliament and the abbey on the bank; to the east, the old Roman and medieval city, the City, with a tight, crooked layout that has not changed since the fire of 1666.
The royal parks. St James's Park, Green Park and, to the west, the edge of Hyde Park: large green patches in a West End of square gardens, the Georgian squares dotted across Mayfair and Bloomsbury.
The South Bank. Southwark and Lambeth, more open, with railway lines fanning into Waterloo and London Bridge and drawing great curves over the street pattern.
Which scale and paper suit it
1:25,000 on a 30 cm square, as in the picture, covers 7 km: from Hyde Park to the Tower of London. At that scale the city is drawn as blocks, here with their outline.
1:10,000 on A3 moves in on a neighbourhood: Soho and Covent Garden, the whole City or Westminster with its gardens, with every building drawn.
In black ink, as here, the map looks like an engraving of the old London plans; in sepia, even more so.
Make it yours
Open the example and move the frame: Greenwich and the Docklands peninsula, which the river wraps in a meander, or Notting Hill and Kensington, with their crescents, deserve a map of their own.
Change all the colours at once with a theme (black ink, sepia, coral, night, blueprint) and download it as PNG. With a free account, also element by element, at 600 dpi, as vector PDF and as SVG.
