Evening talk by Mark Ovenden and Andrew Smithers about the history of British railway cartography and the book 'Mapping Britain's Railways'.
Mark Ovenden and Andrew Smithers are at The London Archives on Wednesday 18 November, talking about their book Mapping Britain's Railways. It's a look at how the railway diagrams we use to get around the country have changed over the last two hundred years, and the two of them wrote and designed the book together. It's illustrated with more than 300 colour maps, so there's plenty to actually look at.
The evening centres on the history of British railway cartography. One of the points they make is that railway diagrams have long led the way in clear passenger information, and they actually predated the iconic London Underground tube map, which has since expanded to cover overground routes as well. If you've ever wondered why the maps we use to navigate the network look the way they do, this is where that comes from.
Ovenden is an author, broadcaster and consultant on design, cartography, typography and architecture in public transport. He's written twenty books, translated into half a dozen languages, and his broadcasting career spans forty years at stations like Radio 1, MTV, Ministry of Sound and Kiss, with documentaries for BBC Four and BBC Radio 4. Smithers first got into schematic map design as a London tube-map viewer; after privatisation in 1997 he drew his first national diagram, and in 2006 he created Project Mapping, the world's largest portal for schematic maps, whose work was adopted by National Rail.
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The talk runs from 7:00pm to 8:30pm at The London Archives, 40 Northampton Road, London EC1R 0HB. It starts promptly at 7:00pm, so they've asked people to arrive ten minutes early. A ticket on its own is £8.00, or you can get the ticket and the book together for £27.00, which saves you £6.
