Maps, and why you should love them more

I'm going to recommend watching the BBC4 series 'Maps: Power, Plunder and Possession" even before I've seen it, because I love maps and everything about them - the artistry, the politics, the sense of a place frozen in time and space, the unreality of them, and the sheer human arrogance of marking out possession on the unstable crust of a spinning metal ball in the middle of nowhere.

I use maps all the time in my work, in my life, probably a lot more than most people do because I use them as a canvas for my tours and treasure hunts. Wandering the city streets holding a 1:2500 printout marked with arcane signs and arrows is a common theme in my professional life, but I also use maps for the things other people use them for - going to work, going to the pub, finding the hotel, etc etc.

Aside from anything else, I have a terrible sense of direction so I rely on maps an awful lot. And the most interesting contention that the series makes is that the modern map, the one we think of as normal and the most obvious way to represent the world, is anything but. So I'm going to watch it and see how that happened, and I recommend that you do the same.

Clearly it's on at some stupid time of night, so catch up with it on iPlayer. Silly television.

http://bbc.co.uk/i/s2wvh/

Those who are about to drink salute you.

Jon Hyman, a dear dear man. A legend, indeed. And a man whose 30th birthday I can't attend. Unlike everyone else, however, I do at least know how to get there. Because it's my job to know where everything is in the City of London. Especially the pubs.

You see, Corney & Barrow on Masons Avenue is one of the hardest places to find in the entire City of London. Even if you’re looking.
 
According to multimap, streetmap AND googlemaps, Masons Avenue DOESN’T EXIST. 
 
Look them up. There’s nothing there. Mostly because it's a pedestrian alley, but also partly, I like to think, as a way of deterring the uninitiated from exploring its many hidden treasures.
 
As a gift to those attending, but especially to Mr Hyman, and by way of an apology for my inability to attend his birthday feastings, here is a short guide to getting to Masons Avenue:
 
From Moorgate station – take a left, or right, depending on which exit you choose. In fact, there’s a distinct possibility you’ll come out in totally the wrong place - the dreaded third exit. If you’re on a main road, you’re in luck. If not, come out of the station, cross the road, follow the road ahead until you’re on Moorgate itself, and proceed as above.
 
When you’re on Moorgate, head south. This will either be right or left. If you pass London Metropolitan University, you’re doing well. If you pass Hotel Chocolat, you should turn round.
Cross at the traffic lights, continue down Moorgate, and take a right between two almost completely characterless office buildings, one of which has a bar at the ground floor called “the Gable”. At the end of this alley, cross Coleman Street, and to the right of no.30, there is another alleyway, almost inconceivably obscure. This is Masons Avenue.
 
Now, from Bank Station. Come out anywhere you like. All the exits are in pretty much the same place, and walking around underground is very unhealthy. Wherever you emerge, look for the statue of a man on a horse in the middle of the junction. To his right (not yours, his) is a building with no windows on the ground floor. This is a good thing, as it’s the Bank of England and they don’t want the likes of you snooping around.
 
At the end of the Bank, turn right into Princes Street. At the end of that, go left-ish into Gresham Street, take the first right into Coleman Street  and then turn left just after Coffee Republic, into Masons Avenue.
 
And finally, from St Pauls station. Depending on which exit you use, there will be an obscenely hideous octagonal office building either across the road or to your right. If it’s to your right, cross the road to the other exit. It’s too horrid to look at up close. From here, you should walk along past a shiny glass office building, past the COSTA, past EAT, Starbucks and Pret, and take a left at the traffic lights onto King Street. At the end are some traffic lights. Go right, take the first left into Basinghall Street, and Masons Avenue is on your right, just after the VITA café.
 
Good luck to you all, birthday wishes to Mr Jon, and adieu.

The perils of precipitate pronouncements

Rather like trying to steal a biscuit while mum is asleep on the sofa, the surprise and shock when, despite to all intents and purposes being unconscious, she mutters "hands off" from another room entirely, my PC is now awake to my treachery and is planning a magnificent and utterly self-destructive send-off, beginning, this morning, with the news that it has decided to unilaterally declare war on my word processing package.
Upon cranking up the machine this morning, I was faced with the news that "your version of Microsoft Office is a big poo head" or words to that effect, and then given the option to "immediately destroy all your work for the last three years" or "give me leave to nag you incessantly forever".
This, bear in mind, while it was still asking me what I wanted to do about the .NET 3.4-95i340953409583945 framework jack-knife dishwasher fluid mustard seed short wave feltrum XP update that had been sitting around for a while in the euphemistically-titled "tray" (litter? anyone?)

So, just to be clear, if my PC actually leaps up and bites off some extremity or just swallows my head before I get a chance to write again, I am buying a Mac. No I really am.

That's it. I'm buying a Mac

The day has come. I've only been waiting for the internet to come online for two and a half months, such is the towering incompetence of TalkTalk. I can finally access the internet from my house (imagine...) but something's been niggling at me for a few weeks. It's not that the computer has got slower and slower as time has gone on. That doesn't surprise me. Nor did it unnerve me that a RAM upgrade, C Cleaner, scouring out the annoying little programmes, uninstalling the AVG scanner that took up all my processor power, and a hundred other things failed to do anything to halt the slow deterioration of the system. The lack of battery power and dodgy build quality were just, I assumed, something I had to accept. The fact that it just sometimes randomly crashed was, in some philosophical way, an acceptable compromise. I hadn't realised that the compromise was all one way.

So when it comes to the point that I'm poring over forums reading posts from one techie to another discussing how to find a version of a file to note down then uninstall and keep a series of numbers to reinstall a programme that is bound to completely destroy everything on my desktop, and I can't even find the file so I'm looking for what to do when you can't find the file, and all of this is because Windows wants to install something and can't and gives me an error code that doesn't come up on the normal list of things that I start to recall a conversation I had with a friend a couple of weeks ago that goes something like this "so what happens when it breaks?" "it doesn't." "how often does it crash?" "*snigger* it doesn't"...

The conversation took place while discussing whether it was worth my buying a Mac. I had never thought of it until Cassie came to stay, and I started playing with the thing. Much as I tried to resist its charms, I started to realise that it wasn't so much the prettiness that was seducing me. It was the fact that it worked so much better than every single PC I've ever owned, seen or heard about. The fact that there doesn't seem to be any need to have to think about it, that I could just get on with what I was doing.

And I'm just so sick of having to fix the bloody thing so much of the time. Once I saw something that doesn't cock up, I feel like an arse for having put up with it for so long. So I'm not going to any more. I might be wrong, but then I can always go back and buy a PC in a couple of years. As of next week, I'm on the mac.

just gets more interesting every time i think about it

I'm not usually much of an enthusiast for the latest technology, Web 2.0, virtual remote desktop networking and what have you, but this evening, i think i might have been converted. I've been doing a lot of research to find a useful (and ideally cost-effective) platform on which to run my secret new City of London corporate treasure hunt activity, and I've found a utility where i can operate my phone from my laptop, which makes things an awful lot easier. Obviously i had to confuse myself horribly by trying to take on my phone of myself taking a picture of my handset on the screen on a backdrop of a picture of the phone (or something to that effect), but every time I think about it, the potential just grows and grows. I'd better get on with it. Watch this space.


Not literally this space. Just an idea of space. If you can watch an idea without form. And all credit to you if you can.

treasure hunt.

I'm doing a treasure hunt as well, and this baby is going to be huge

17th August
12pm (that's noon)
UNDISCLOSED LOCATION, City of London
Forget your Dr Kawashima... you want brain training? You'll get an assault course the like of which you've never witnessed.
£12 (or £10 if you bring three other people and form your own team)
see facebook page
or email andrew@showmethesquaremile.com for details

walking tours

I'm doing a couple of walking tours

10th and 24th August
2pm sharp
City of London Information Centre, south side of St Pauls Cathedral
Whoever turns up gets a really bloody good two hours of London history.
For a mere £6
here's a link to a map and things

The Exits at Bank Station part 3

When I get back to England, this guide is going to be further improved, with photos of all exits, where you can really get to from them, and (given how utterly futile it is to move between exits) which is the closest exit when you get off the tube, so you don't have to spend any more time weeping with frustration than is strictly necessary.

The Exits at Bank Station part 2

Well, that was interesting. I went down to Whitechapel for some sage guidance from the wise Adam Brichto of brickwallfilms (doing all sorts of exciting things in films), and on the way back I thought I'd spend a few minutes making a little guide to what happens when the unwitting traveller tries to leave Bank station. I'd love to say it was an easy undertaking, but quite frankly what happened was even more bizarre than I could have imagined. Having spent an entire hour going from exit to exit underground in the rush hour, I can attest the following with absolute certainty:

1) Once you get off the train, the only sane course of action is to head for the nearest exit. However long the traffic lights take to change above ground, you will never save time going underground. Unless it's raining fire, there's just no excuse. I have checked. It's just not worth it.

2) The morons who built the subway system for Bank station were both very evil and very very stupid, masters of the blind alley, the misleading sign and the completely purposeless line drawing. They hate you.

3) There is only one document in the entire world that explains what to do at Bank Station. And you can only get it in one place. Bank Station. It's called "Continuing your journey from Bank" which is nice. It's by no means perfect, but it does show you where the exits are, more or less.

I'm sure this breaches some copyright laws, but I'm putting it up on this site. Only not yet, because the blog is buggering around. I'll try again later. And after that, I'll put up a little sub-site showing what you actually see when you walk out of Bank Station.

You lucky people.

The Exits at Bank Station

This is just infuriating. I'm doing a walk this Sunday for the City of London Guides, and most of the nearby Underground Stations are closed. So I'm trying to direct people from Bank station, but it's nearly impossible because nobody has a list of where the exits from Bank station are. There are 9 of them, and for the uninitiated or those with no sense of direction, it can be very confusing. It's bad enough that Bank is an evil, twisting spaghetti junction underground. But this apparent refusal to allow people to leave in the direction they would like is simply wrong.

So here, for the benefit of anyone who wants to know, and because it's taken me a long time that I could easily have spent doing something much more useful, is the complete (as far as I know) list of exits from the Bank station booking hall.

Exit 1:....

actually I can't do this. I can't find it. I'm going to have to go to Bank and check. and take photos. and report back. But I will. And I'm going to do it for all the other exits from Tube stations in the City as well. Because quite frankly, this is annoying me.

to digress for a moment...

"Again they walked on in silence. They were nearing Clerkenwell Close, and had to pass a corner of the prison in a dark lane, where the wind moaned drearily. The line of the high blank wall was relieved in colourless gloom against a sky of sheer night. Opposite, the shapes of poverty-eaten houses and grimy workshops stood huddling in the obscurity. From near at hand came shrill voices of children chasing each other about--children playing at midnight between slum and gaol."

The Nether World by George Gissing, an almost unrelentingly miserable novel, yet beautiful, written by a man who married twice and very ill-advisedly, and was dead before the age of 50 from emphysema.

This Saturday I am undertaking a walk through Clerkenwell, the setting of the Nether World, an area of London that resonates with sadness and misery, and it's a place I really have a huge fondness for. Having just read The Nether World, I am even more caught up in the shoddy romance of the place. Hopefully, some of this partiality will come across this weekend, and I can feel that I have satisfied the rigours of my craft and entertained my audience. The most difficult thing is to fulfill one's own expectations. I want to cram into two hours some of the fascination with which I regard this corner of the city, the awe in which I hold its winding alleys and misshapen walls, and if not those then at least the joy in its strange stories and the lives of its endlessly fascinating inhabitants. And yet I fear that all I can convey is something vaguely entertaining about a history too remote to grasp. Perhaps I should have a watchword, so that I can muster, from the damp bricks of Corporation Row, from the curving path of Ray Street and the sunlight streaming down on Mount Pleasant some sense of the long and torrid path human experience has taken in these streets and fields, of the closeness of their lives to our own. Perhaps it should be "Gissing", as a tribute to the great man's grasp on the Hogarthian, effortlessly Londonish grime of Clerkenwell. Thanks George.

My walk is at Farringdon Station, 2pm this Saturday.

It never rains...

And so to the middle season of the year, whatever it's called. I don't want to jinx it like last year (meteorological predictions having nothing to do with complex air pressure over the Pacific and everything to do with whether I say certain words or not) so I won't say the actual word. But we all know what it is. And it's traditionally the busiest time of the year for tour guides, what with all the tourists wandering around with money to spend and ignorance to combat. I'm doing my bit, more or less. And for the sake of the Clerkenwell and Islington Guides, and my part-time employers the Harlequin, (and hopefully my bank balance) I'm putting on a little peripatetic event followed by Pimms and lemonade.

There are always downsides a tie-in with hospitality providers, but the sticky issue of being beholden to the landlords is only the case if one runs regular tours, and is taking some kind of kickback. It's not professional, and it's not worth it.

It's actually quite a good thing that something else has potentially turned up. The temptation when planning a tour is always to spend far too much time on research into obscure side-issues and forget to concentrate on the really important things, the presentation, and remembering what's important. One more or less factoid found after three hours is not going to make or break it. Failing to engage the imagination of the audience, on the other hand, is a killer...

Plans have been mooted for a database index of facts to save having to check the same books over and over, but that depends to an extent on the willingness of Miss B, currently sleeping off what might generously be called overindulgence, having finished her degree, bar the shouting - literally, in this case, as she still has to take a viva for her project. It shouldn't be a problem, as long as she doesn't start arguing with the examiner...

Six and Out

six hours of walking, and i'm officially knackered, perhaps even suffering from heat exhaustion. still, it's better than working for a living, and i made 35 people happy today which has to be good for the general stock of humanity. Two tours through the backstreets of the City to see some old churches doesn't sound that inviting, not on a beautiful, sitting in Finsbury Circus, drinking Pimms and watching the world (or at least its female contingent) go by sort of a day, but I'm glad I did it. Quite how I'm going to do it again tomorrow when i can barely feel my legs is another matter...

extra points if anyone knows where this photo was taken...

surely not

Every way I've looked at it, I can't escape the impression that the angel is projectile vomiting. Did the sculptor not see it? Can I really talk about the high-relief quoins and neo-classical pastiche in dispassionate tones when all I can see is a cherub insouciantly yakking up a bunch of flowers?