Berlin, drawn from its own streets.

Berlin on paper

The Spree comes in from the south-east and winds north-west across the frame, splitting around the museum island in the centre, and the Landwehr Canal runs beside it a kilometre to the south as a straight cut through Kreuzberg — river and canal crossing the same city, one wandering and one ruled. Between and around them the blocks are large and square: Berlin's tenement courtyards mean the street pattern is a coarse grid of big perimeter blocks rather than the fine mesh of a British city, so a Berlin print reads as bold shapes rather than texture.

The circular railway is the frame's structure. The Ringbahn encloses the inner city as an almost perfect oval, and at twelve kilometres across it sits inside the sheet with the districts arranged around it. The Stadtbahn crosses east to west on its viaduct, and the wide avenues cut through everything at their own angles — the long axis through the Tiergarten, the boulevard east from Alexanderplatz.

The green is in large pieces. The Tiergarten prints as a substantial block right of the centre's western edge, cut by its avenues and paths; the old airfield to the south is an extraordinary shape on a map, a vast empty field with its runways still drawn and the streets stopping dead at the perimeter. Bring the frame in to three kilometres and a single Kiez fills the sheet, courtyard blocks and all.