Where am I now and where do I go to next?

Route map of the North London Line from Drawing my way round London

Where am I now and where do I go to next are two questions I am asking myself a lot at the moment and they have nothing to do with getting from A to B. I've completed two contrasting art projects and now I feel at a bit of a loose end. I would love to get my teeth into something new but nothing intriguing has yet appeared on the horizon. So instead of kicking my heels at home I visited Tower Hamlets History Library & Archives to learn a bit about life in the Jewish East End in Whitechapel in the late 1890s and that included looking at maps.

Map of my route along the Hertford
Union canal.

As it happens Drawing my way round London and 805 steps along the Hertford Union Canal did both involve travelling and map-making. Having spent a long time drawing these maps it made me think about how we use them. In my case I wanted to show a simplified route of where my art was taking me and to make it easier for the readers of my blogs to follow.

The exhibition Maps and the 20th century: Drawing the line at the British Library was worth visiting and is ending in a couple of weeks. It shows many types of maps that I have never seen before. For example I was very struck by a huge Soviet town plan of Brighton from as late as 1990. I always try and read the labels on maps to try and get a handle on the geography but these were in Cyrillic which made these familiar names completely foreign and I found that a bit disturbing.

Some of our own collection

I enjoyed seeing the original rough pencil sketch for the London tube map from 1931 which was hand drawn by Harry Beck. This basic design has survived for nearly 90 years and has been flexible enough to undergo numerous changes over the years and works just as well on digital platforms while retaining the original characteristics we have become so used to. I also became nostalgic for the A to Z maps of London which were originally compiled in the 1930s by Phyllis Pearsall, a British painter and writer. For years I used never to leave home without one and now we just rely on Google Maps to direct us.

An example of a different kind of map was produced by the Ford Motor Company as a souvenir of a trip you could take through the Ford Rouge Plant in River Rouge MI in 1940. This was a diagrammatic map of the progress of iron ore to the finished car. And as a complete contrast from any other exhibit there was an Escape Map dress on display. At the end of the war there was a surplus of military 'escape and evasion' maps which had been printed onto silk in order to be lightweight, more durable than paper and silent when opened. This dress was made using military maps of South East Asia which may have come from an RAF airfield in southern England. This reminded me that my Grandmother made my aunt's wedding dress from parachute silk in the late 1940s because there was so much of it available.

My foray into maps may or may not lead to a new direction for my artwork but it has been fun exploring them and if I fancy browsing any more unusual maps I can pore over The Map Book edited by Peter Barber that I was given as a birthday present.

What did the Georgians ever do for us?

Georgian town house built in 1785, Well Street, Hackney

Quite a lot as it turns out as a quick romp around the exhibition devoted to this subject shows. This exhibition marks the 300th anniversary of the accession of King George I in 1714. The Georgian age continued under four successive kings of the House of Hanover until it ended with the death of George IV in 1830.

During this period Britain's prosperity grew as a result of success in continental wars, which led to overseas trade improving which in turn encouraged innovative manufacturing methods and before you know it the industrial revolution was under way and we were on our way to becoming a world power.

The context for the exhibition is set in the first gallery with portraits of the four monarchs looking well fed and rather self-satisfied displayed at regular intervals and interspersed with key dates and descriptions of battles won and laws passed, etc.

Not surprisingly this exhibition concentrates on the positive aspects of Georgian life and pretty much ignores the squalour associated with this period. It's quite obvious from reading Life at Grasmere that begging was commonplace and times were often hard for people. Thomas Coram's Foundling Hospital, which opened in 1741 because so many mothers had no choice but to abandon their children, is only mentioned on the back of the exhibition notes as part of an interesting walking tour of London. Edinburgh, Cheltenham and Bath, all famous Georgian cities do get a mention but most of the attention is on our capital city, London.

Enough of the grumbling. I didn't realise that the urban life I enjoy today has been largely influenced by this period. Public parks that I use regularly were being laid out and a great many of the streets had already been mapped out (the area I live in Hackney was still countryside at this stage). One of the most interesting galleries consists of a blown-up street map of London covering the floor which quite a few visitors, including myself, were engrossed in walking over and scrutinising the road names. It was odd to see Trafalgar Square missing and that's because that great battle hadn't happened then.

So, the Georgians were responsible for creating celebrity culture, the rise of the middle classes who quickly learned to enjoy shopping, furnishing their homes with luxury items and planning their gardens. The fashion industry was born during this period as was the design and advertising industry which I have worked in for several decades. The down side to all this consumerism was that the production of a lot of it depended on slavery which was not abolished until 1807 and in some areas of the world continues to this day.

One of the most enduring legacies of this period was in the design of houses and public buildings. Georgian houses even now command a hefty premium because of their elegance, proportions of their rooms, restrained use of embellishments and the assumptions these make about the owners sophisticated taste and lifestyle. In honour of today's post I went to Well Street earlier and did a sketch of my nearest Georgian town house which used to be a hotel and is now a hostel. For all that it has undergone much remodelling you can still see the typical Georgian features that characterise the architecture of this influential era.

Georgians revealed: Life, style and the making of modern Britain at the British Library until 14 March 2014