I stumbled across this beautiful book at the weekend, ‘Metropolis: Mapping the City’ by Jeremy Black, all about the history and process of mapping urban spaces from a human perspective. Like many creatives, I simply adore maps and would happily spend time poring over the line detail. And this book is chock full of hand drawn cartography… capturing grand cityscapes through the ages.
“Cities are the repositories of countless hopes and dreams, places where destruction and conflict, vision and order sit side by side. Mapping and recording them brings order and boundaries to their teeming streets.”
I particularly love the different approaches to angles and overviews… how each artist has attempted to fit the scale of the sprawl into one illustration. It’s pleasing to see that it was just as varied in the earliest hand drawn maps as it is in the more modern depictions. Having made a few attempts for various heritage projects I can appreciate the time it takes to fit in all that detail! Suspect that there’ll be some good technical inspiration for future projects in here too… but in the meantime it’s just a lovely book to flick through and admire.
Looking for a copy of your own? Metropolis: Mapping the City by Jeremy Black is published by Conway. ISBN 978-1-84486-220-7
Need more Monday Inspiration? Here’s an archive of my rambling blog posts. Featuring anything i’ve found creatively stimulating, including my research trips, fellow artists worth a follow and a few book and film reviews. Send me your recommendations too!
