One of which, of course, was the street on which the Old Queen was. It was hard to find any definitive lists of these spurious enmapped locations, but there were suggestions. Invented streets inserted into maps to right copyright wrongs, to prove one representation was ripped off from another. “ Don’t you know what a trap street is? The cult collector had said, and no she had not, but a moment online sorted that. But it’s equally difficult to identify any trap streets, phantom alleys, or other spectral street architecture on its maps - let alone all of them.įor consolation, we turn from unfindable real trap streets to a fictional one, so beautifully described in China Miéville’s Kraken: We’re stuck in a cartographic Catch-22: It’s virtually impossible to prove that there aren’t a hundred map traps hidden in the A-Z. Are map traps being eliminated, or simply replaced upon discovery?Įither way, the gap between the 100 traps supposedly hiding in the A-Z and the measly trio described here is far too great.
The blog notes that the ski slope “hasn’t been used for about a decade” in the A to Z. But on other maps, and in real life, there’s just the unbroken green of Blackheath Common.Īnd then there’s The Great Wen, a great London blog, which discussed the Haggerston Park Ski Slope late last year, after a reader sent in a picture of the strange map trap. In her A-Z (and my edition too), it’s the continuation of General Wolfe Road on the south side of Shooters Hill Road, connecting it to Hare and Billet Road. This was a long, tedious process, but I found one on the first page.” In a blog entry dated October 23, 2013, she describes the process: “I started by photocopying pages of the A-Z, and comparing the roads on it to the roads on Google Maps, checking one by one that the roads matched up by crossing them out. In my opinion, not a “pure” trap street, as it merely mis-labelled an existing pedestrian walkway, which in more recent editions has anyway reverted to its true name, roadway Walk.Ī lesser-known example was discovered by arts student Maisie Ann Bowes in the course of a project on “location” for the London College of Communication. The example that keeps cropping up in any abortive list is Bartlett Place, named after Kieran Bartlett, an employee at the Geographer’s A-Z Street Atlas company. Especially considering the evidence of trap streets in the London A to Z. On the other hand: That sounds just a bit too much like an urban legend. On the one hand, it makes sense to put a trap on every page that can be copied separately.
#Trap street tv#
That rumour seems to stem from a quote to that effect by a spokesperson of the Geographer’s A-Z Street Atlas company, which produces the London A-Z, in Map Man, a BBC TV program from 2005. The London A-Z is said to contain about 100 trap streets (or other map traps), one for each of its pages. The fake entries can take the form of so-called trap streets, deliberately altered street widths, erroneous elevations or depths, or even whole “paper towns” (see # 643 for more on the curious case of Agloe, New York - the paper town that came to life).
The phenomenon is well-known and widespread. The London A-Z contains so-called map traps: non-existent features inserted into the map to catch out unauthorised copiers of the original. Even more shockingly, its imperfections are deliberate. And no online map is as beautiful, or feels as canonical, as the ones between its covers.īut the Guide to all of London (sorry, Zones 3 to 9) is not flawless. Its batteries never wore out, and it never required an internet connection. And when online mapping took over that job, I still took it along. When I still lived in the city that King Lud built, my battered copy guided me everywhere within Zones 1 and 2. The London A-Z is one of my favourite books. The conclusion, included in the minutiae of that meeting: “There is no evidence that there has ever been a ski slope and it is thought to possibly be an Ordnance Survey blip?” But the power of maps is such that the local Haggerston Park Users Group in 2010 devoted at least one of its meetings to finding out why that ski slope was mentioned in the A-Z. There is no ski slope at Haggerston Park. London’s landmark street guide has been lying to you. Stick your slats on the Overground to Hoxton or the Central Line to Bethnal Green, drag them another mile to said location… and the only thing going rapidly downhill will be your good cheer.
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