London, drawn from its own streets.

London on paper

At the width this page opens on, the Thames runs the full breadth of the paper and organises everything else. It comes in from Chelsea in the west, turns north under Westminster, and leaves the frame past Tower Bridge — nothing else in the city has that shape, so it is the first thing anyone reads from across a room. The parks arrive next as pale blocks: Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens together in the west, Regent's Park at the top of the sheet, St James's Park and Green Park pointing at the palace, Battersea Park on the south bank.

Between them there is no grid anywhere. London was never laid out to a plan, and the print is honest about it: the medieval tangle of the City, the small regular blocks where Bloomsbury and Mayfair were built as squares, and the old roads out — Edgware Road, the Kennington and Brixton roads, the routes north through Camden — cutting across the rest at their own angles. The canals read as thin deliberate lines against that confusion, the Regent's Canal tracking east above Regent's Park.

The frame is where the decision is. Wide, the residential streets become texture rather than lines, and the poster works as a shape on a wall. Bring it in to five kilometres and the terraces separate — the long Victorian rows of the east read differently from the crescents and squares further west. Come in again, to two or three, and it stops being a picture of London and starts being a picture of a place: the market, the common, the road somebody grew up on, and the streets are close enough to trace with a finger.