“I tell them I can manage, there isn’t any damage, and as I’m being led out, I get my A to Z out”
So… what do we know about the A to Z?
The A to Z of HMHB
The A to Z of HMHB
“I tell them I can manage, there isn’t any damage, and as I’m being led out, I get my A to Z out”
So… what do we know about the A to Z?
GOK WAN ACOLYTE
The first A-Z was produced by Phyllis Pearsall, who apparently walked all 9000 streets of London in order to create it, and then went on to found the company which continues to produce A-Z map books (as shown above). They are extremely useful when your Sat-Nav (q.v.) points out that it’s not from “round here”
1 August 2017
WARDEN HODGES
Quite expansive- my Liverpool A-Z covers Wirral and Runcorn. Southport one covers Ormskirk and Skem and my Chester one goes into Flint.
1 August 2017
JUST MARK
Early ones suffered from page alopecia and anyone unfortunate enough to be asked to produce a large map by photocopying individual pages and sticking them together found some roads didn’t line up properly.
6 August 2017
Liquid len
The only way to find your way around London, until TomToms totally took to travelling everywhere with everyone.
7 August 2017
wobbly-jelly
Isn’t it a ‘law’ that wherever you are going is either in the middle crack / fold or just on the edge of a page and the rest of the road is 10 pages away
10 August 2017
JUST MARK
@Wobbly-Jelly, even worse if you live on the outskirts of the area covered by the A-Z and end up in an inset map on a random page that leads nowhere (or requires the next A-Z publication along).
10 August 2017
Paul F
@Just Mark – that’s why the customise service by the Ordnance Survey was such a great development. I’ve got one centred on my house.
11 August 2017
TRANSIT FULL OF KEITH
The London A-Z allegedly contains about 100 copyright traps (non-existent streets and features designed to trick cartographical plagiarists).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street
25 August 2017
dr desperate
Trap streets are uncopyrightable (along with dermatoglyphics, the longest word in the English language without a repeated letter).
26 August 2017
Pirx the purist
As a cartophiliac, by the age of 14 I had the A-Z books for Liverpool, Manchester & Brum despite never having been near M/cr or Brum and having only ever passed through Liverpool once (on a Crosville day trip to Southport).
28 April 2019