51.5074°N / 0.1278°W · United Kingdom
London reads by its loops, and the widest of them all but encloses the Isle of Dogs. Other rivers run under the streets, covered over long ago: on the map, the Thames is the only one still visible.
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.
There is no general plan. The City was rebuilt after the fire of 1666 on its medieval plots, and its streets still turn as they did before the flames. The grids you find here are local, born of estates: the Pimlico grid laid out by Thomas Cubitt from 1825, the regular terraces and squares of Belgravia, by the same Cubitt between 1830 and 1847. None of them spreads to the city.
Three things do structure the drawing, and the frame has to hold them: the chain of royal parks opening an almost continuous green cut to the west, from Kensington Gardens to St James’s Park, the arc of the Regent’s Canal crossing the north from west to east, and the great loop in the east. The buried rivers are not drawn: they are no longer watercourses, only street names.
Brown brick and Portland stone on a light, faintly warm grey ground. London has no strong dominant colour, it has two materials: the fired earth of ordinary buildings and the blond limestone of public ones. A range of close values, warm on the building fabric and cooled on the water and the parks, serves this city better than hard contrast, which would misrepresent a very even weave.
Landscape. The Thames runs west to east, and its meanders spread the city sideways far more than they stretch it upward. The frame has to hold Kensington Gardens to the west and the loop of the Isle of Dogs to the east: without them you lose the two shapes that sign the map, the green cut and the great bend. In portrait you have to step back a notch to keep both, and that is what the opening frame does; landscape will give them back to you larger.
The title, a line beneath it, the coordinates. The name of a borough, a date, the name of a station: that line is what turns a plan of London into your plan of London.
Sixteen inks, in the configurator’s order. It is not in the catalogue, but you will find it in the palette library, filed under its material.
Opens the colour workshop with these 16 inks in place: change one, keep the rest.
It will wait in your account, ready for any piece.
After the Great Fire, Christopher Wren proposed straight avenues and regular vistas. The scheme was abandoned: every title of property would have had to be redefined, one by one. So the city rebuilt on its medieval lines, and those lines are what you still read today. It is the deep difference with New York, where a plan came before the city.
The Fleet, the largest of London’s hidden rivers, runs down from Hampstead and Highgate to Blackfriars. Wren had made a canal of it after 1666; it was covered over in stages from 1733, sections went underground with the Regent’s Canal works from 1812, then the river was absorbed into Bazalgette’s sewers after 1858 and into the Metropolitan Railway works in 1862. It left its name to Fleet Street. Holborn is said to take its own from the Middle English hol, hollow, and bourne, brook: the Fleet ran in places at the bottom of a steep valley.
It is not one, and never was: it is a peninsula held on three sides by a meander of the Thames. What gave it the look of an island are the docks cut across its neck, West India from 1802, East India in 1806, Millwall in 1868, with their locks at either end.
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 street where you rented your first room, the bridge you crossed in the morning, the Sunday park. The Thames is the same for everyone. The piece of city you keep around it is not.
Compose my London print
