The cultural uses of the A-Z London street atlas: navigational performance and the imagining of urban form

Hornsey, Richard

Abstract

For a decade from the late 1990s, the A-Z London street atlas became a recurrent motif within art works and popular media texts. This essay collates and explores these cultural responses to the atlas, to consider what this might reveal about the affective dimensions of ordinary urban way-finding. There were three persistent motifs that ran through these diverse works: a basic fascination with the destruction of the atlas, the foregrounding of a stoic or heroic pedestrian figure, and the attachment of the atlas to a projected network of mobile individuals that connected on the streets at random times and places. An interrogation of these tropes reveals how the A-Z became a means to explore the terms of an expanded pedestrian experience, as well as a possible configuration of metropolitan movement and contact. Furthermore, the popularity of these texts points to an excess of affect that might have become embedded within acts of A-Z way-finding. Using, owning or being seen with the atlas briefly became a potential mechanism for imagining one’s contribution to a mobile metropolitan community. Hence, this essay is both a focussed exploration of street-atlas poetics and an attempt to think more deeply about the cultural dynamics of everyday urban navigation.

Citation

Hornsey, R. (2016). The cultural uses of the A-Z London street atlas: navigational performance and the imagining of urban form. cultural geographies, 23(2), https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474015572600

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Mar 1, 2016
• Online Publication Date: Mar 10, 2016
• Publication Date: Apr 1, 2016
• Deposit Date: Mar 30, 2016
• Publicly Available Date: Mar 30, 2016
• Journal: cultural geographies
• Print ISSN: 1474-4740
• Electronic ISSN: 1477-0881
• Publisher: SAGE Publications
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 23
• Issue: 2
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474015572600
• Keywords: A-Z, cartography, imagined communities, London, way-finding
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/777768
• Publisher URL: http://cgj.sagepub.com/content/23/2/265