52.4862°N / 1.8904°W · United Kingdom
The first thing this map tells you is something missing: there is no river. What water there is, the city dug itself.
You choose the framing, the palette and the words of the caption. The work is drawn from real data, then printed to order in the workshop closest to you.
At the centre, an inner ring road closes a compact core, its roundabouts strung along it like beads. Threading through everything, faint but continuous, runs a network of canals: they are the reason the city is here, and they behave on the map like rivers that were drawn with a much finer pen. South-west of the centre a rectangular sheet of water fed that network. North-east, where several motorways meet, an interchange piles its slip roads over the canals, the railways and a diverted stream.
You need to know how faintly those canals draw. They are there, but they are the thinnest lines on the sheet, far paler than any river would be, and a soft ink will lose them entirely. That matters more here than anywhere else in this collection, because without them the print becomes a field of streets with no explanation. The railways, which are everywhere around the centre, will not appear at all. The interchange, by contrast, comes through perfectly: motorways make the blackest lines we draw.
This is the one print in the set where a pale ink is a mistake. The canals carry the whole story and they are drawn as hairlines, so anything soft will erase them and leave you with an even field of streets. Choose a firm ink and a water tone dark enough to separate the threads from the roads around them. There is no green to think about and no coastline to balance: the decision is entirely about how much you can see.
Portrait, ring road at the centre and the fabric running off every edge. The setting is a compromise between two things that pull apart: pull back and the interchange to the north-east becomes magnificent, but the canals vanish altogether; come closer and the threads read better, but the interchange leaves the sheet. The chosen frame keeps the canals just perceptible and the interchange in the corner.
The title, one line under it, the coordinates. The name of a canal, a lock number, a year of digging: on this print the caption does not add colour, it restores the subject.
The Birmingham Canal was authorised in 1768, open as far as the Wednesbury collieries the following year and finished to Wolverhampton in 1772. The whole network grew from it. Every thread of water on your print was dug by someone, which is a thing almost no other city print can say.
Birmingham is generally held to be the one large British city built without a major river, which is why its own boast is about canals rather than water frontage. The length of that network depends entirely on where you draw the city's boundary, so we will not put a figure on it. What the map shows is enough: threads instead of a channel.
The Gravelly Hill interchange opened on 24 May 1972, the first free-flowing interchange in Britain, five levels high, crossing canals, railways and a diverted stream in one structure. The press had already nicknamed it before it was built. On your print it is the darkest tangle on the sheet, while the canals it spans are the palest lines: the map reverses their importance exactly.
Yes. The search covers the whole world, from a capital to a hamlet. For the Sky collection, any date works, past or future: the sky is calculated.
From 21 × 29.7 cm to 84.1 × 118.9 cm, that is A4 to A0, portrait or landscape depending on the material. Every size is shown with its price in the editor.
Four, from the barest to the most dressed.
Allow 1 to 4 working days for making, up to 7 for hand-assembled frames and canvases, then 1 to 6 working days in transit with standard delivery.
Digital editions are available immediately: the file of your piece is emailed to you as soon as you order.
The towpath you took as a shortcut, the bridge over the water you never looked down from, the roundabout you always got wrong. The network is the same for everyone. The stretch of it you knew is not.
Compose my Birmingham print
