The Map Print
Birmingham, drawn from its own streets.
More canal than Venice, as everyone born here will tell you, and on a print that claim finally has a picture to go with it.
From £19.95 unframed, £59.95 framed · Needs: a place. No data.
The frame 9 km across at the default · The water the canals · Where England, the United Kingdom · Position 52.4949° N · 1.8518° W
Birmingham on paper
The canals are the reason Birmingham draws so well. They arrive from every direction and meet in the middle of the frame, and because they were cut for boats rather than for people they behave differently from everything around them: long straight reaches, sudden right angles, flights of locks stepping away from the junctions. Against the loose street pattern of the city they look almost drawn on afterwards.
Then there is the road engineering, which is the other half of the city's character. The inner ring curls around the centre and the radial routes fan out through it — the Bristol Road, the Hagley Road, the Stratford Road — each one gathering terraces along its length. At the top right of a nine-kilometre frame the motorway interchange spreads across several hundred metres in loops and slip roads stacked over each other, printing as a knot that no other British city can offer.
Between those two systems the streets read as districts with their own grain. Digbeth's blocks are industrial: long, low, aligned to the canal arms and the railway viaducts. The Jewellery Quarter is the opposite, a dense mesh of small streets and workshop courts on a slightly different angle to everything near it. Further out the Victorian and Edwardian terraces run in repeating rows off the radials, and the parks arrive as pale shapes between them.
Nine kilometres across holds all of that with room at the edges. Bring the frame in to three and a district fills the sheet; take it out past fifteen and the conurbation takes over, with the motorways and the reservoirs doing the drawing instead of the streets.
What to frame
Each of these opens the Studio already framed on it. Move the frame, change how wide it reaches, and choose how the streets are drawn.
The city
9 km acrossthe canal junctions, the ring, the radial roads and the interchange at the corner.
Digbeth
3.2 km acrossthe arms and basins, the viaducts, the works and the yards beneath them.
Jewellery Quarter
3.2 km acrossthe workshop mesh, the cemetery grounds and the canal along one side.
Moseley
3.2 km acrossthe village crossroads, the private park and the long avenues off the Alcester Road.
Bournville
3.2 km acrossthe model village's greens and curving streets, the works and the station.
Jewellery Quarter to Moseley
both ends namedcentre to suburb on one sheet, both ends named where they sit.
A postcode
B18 or B13 in the Studio and the frame holds that patch alone.
How it works
From the Studio to your wall in three steps.
Step 01
Choose your subject
Connect Strava in one tap for a race, a ride or a whole year. Or search for a place, type a postcode for your street on the old Ordnance Survey, or add a photograph — none of those needs an account.
Step 02
Choose your style
Start from a finished design and make it yours: the words, the colours, the size. Twenty-three styles for your own miles, four treatments for a place, six layouts for a photograph, and the old survey as drawn or in your colours.
Step 03
We print and frame it
Pick a frame, check out, and it is printed to order on fine-art paper, framed by hand and posted to you, tracked.
Birmingham map print: the questions
Do the canals really show up that clearly?
Yes. They are water on the map, so the print draws them as water: the junctions, the basins, the arms into the works, and the locks where the line steps. On a Birmingham print they are the first thing the eye follows.
Is Spaghetti Junction on it?
At the default frame it sits near the top-right corner. If you want it as the subject, frame two kilometres around it — the loops fill the sheet and it stops looking like a road at all.
Which frame for the Jewellery Quarter alone?
About one and a half kilometres. At that width the courts and the short streets separate, and the cemeteries and the canal give the sheet its edges.
Where does the map come from?
OpenStreetMap, through OpenFreeMap’s vector tiles — the same data the race prints draw. Nothing is invented: if a street is missing it is missing from the map, and anyone can add it at openstreetmap.org.
Can I print somewhere near Birmingham instead?
Yes — anywhere on earth. Search the Studio for a town, a village or a postcode and the frame arrives at the size that place wants; the slider and the drag take it from there.
- Made to orderPrinted for you, never from stock
- Fine-art paperArchival inks, framed by hand
- Tracked deliveryUK delivery £7.85, tracked · worldwide, priced at checkout
- Arrives damaged?We replace it, no quibble
Your Birmingham, on the wall.
Compose it free in the Studio. Order it when it holds the streets you mean.
How The Map Print works · Every city we have written about · Paper, frames and sizes