map of the pilgrimage route from London to Jerusalem drawn by the 13th-century historian Matthew Paris, who was a monk at St Alban's Abbey. It is one of several manuscripts in his handwriting and with his drawings, and occurs at the beginning of his universal history of the world.

 Matthew Paris’s Map of the Route to Jerusalem. St Albans, c.1250
Matthew Paris was a medieval monk and chronicler. He entered the Abbey of St Alban as a monk on 12 January 1217, and was probably born some 17 years earlier. Matthew spent the rest of his life there, apart from visits to the royal court in London, and a year-long mission that took him to an abbey in Norway.

Matthew Paris produced the most important historical writings of the 13th century. His chief work, the 'Chronica Major', chronicled events from the creation of the world until 1259, the year he died. For its greater part, the 'Chronica Major' is a revision and expansion of an existing chronicle by an earlier St Alban's monk, called Roger of Wendover. From 1235 onwards, however, it's the first-hand record of events the author heard about (perhaps from northbound travellers, who would stay at St Alban's on their first night out of London) or witnessed for himself.

mapping my own personal journey

Emma johnson is a London visual artist, she art work "mapping my own personal journey" is make me crazy, it's a paper cutting collage, much much details, i can imagine it has many stories in it. 

the map’s dissection and dislocation representing the fragmented nature of memory, time and history.

(Aylesbury, Leeds, Reading, London, Ipswich)

Fête du Flâneur: Be There.

What the heck is a flâneur, you ask? Three words: My. Dream. Job. And it has nothing to do with making flan. 

The straight translation of the French word flâneur is "stroller," but legend has it that it was Charles Baudelaire, the 19th century French poet, critic, and translator, who gave the term its richer meaning. (That's Baudelaire in the photo below—he looks like a real cheery guy. He reminds me of me.) 

Baudelaire's flâneur was a "gentleman stroller of city streets," or more specifically, "a person who walks the city in order to experience it, " or perhaps even, "a botanist of the sidewalk." Nice work if you can get it. 

As they wander the city, flâneurs flirt with the boundaries between participating and observing.  Somecredit the flâneurs with being "the first to express the notion that a complete lack of utilitarian value could be a social statement"—the original culture jammers. 

Flâneurs understand the value of slow, that it takes patience to discover the city's hidden layers, as in the photo below. And in an expression of that desire for a slower place, a mid-1800s-era flâneur might be found sauntering through a fashionable Parisian arcade decked out like a dandy with a turtle on a leash—contributing to the spectacle while observing it. 

The recent repopularization of the term flâneur in Seattle's rampant pseudo intellectual urbanist circles can be traced to the whimsical use of the term by urban designer and landscape architect Paul Chasanas an alternate title for his Program Coordinator position with the local green urbanist nonprofit Great City. In recent weeks the Seattle flâneur craze has hit fever pitch, and this Thursday evening flâneur wannabes from far and wide will descend on what is sure to be the flâneuriest event the Pacific Northwest has ever seen: Fête du Flâneur. 

Fête du Flâneur is a fundraiser for Great City. But don't let that scare you off, because this particular fundraiser will feature a aerial acrobat, a clown trained in France, and a burlesque dancer, along with delectable food and drink provided by local gourmets. The guest list includes noted flâneur enthusiasts Mike McGinn, Tim Burgess, Mike O'Brien, and Darryl Smith. 

Most importantly, there will be a sensational "mustache-off" between two local non-profit directors, who shall remain nameless because firearms may or may not be involved. 

The Art of Walking in London: Representing Urban Pedestrianism in the Early Nineteenth Century

Through Winter Streets to steer your Course
aright,
How to walk clean by Day, and safe by Night,
How jostling Crouds, with Prudence, to
decline,
When to assert the Wall, and when resign,
I sing . . .
John Gay, Trivia: or, the Art of Walking the Streets of London (London, 1716), I. 1–5.

Up to and well after Trivia's first publication, textual and visual representations of moving through London either sanitise the city's public spaces for polite consumption, or emphasise the confusion and disorientation that a newcomer to London would experience. Addison and Steele's periodicals The Tatler (1709–10) and The Spectator (1711–14), for example, present readers with a polite and ordered metropolis, while Ned Ward's monthly periodical The London Spy (1698–1700) emphasises the very chaos, dirt, and disorder that Addison and Steele later write out. Trivia, by contrast, forges a dialogue between these two modes of representing the city, acknowledging that London can be dirty, dangerous, and confusing, while at the same time instructing its readers on how to avoid the more unpleasant or even perilous situations with which they might be confronted in the city's streets. In its allusions to a range of instructional writings in both its format and content, Trivia argues that London can be read and understood. Moreover, as Gay's opening lines suggest, the poem sets out not only to provide advice on personal safety, but also to put forth an etiquette for London's streets based on shared ideals of politeness and an understanding of 'due Civilities' (II. 45).

From the late eighteenth century, writers and artists seeking to engage with contemporary London returned to a concern with the 'art' of walking in London, often but not always making specific reference to Trivia. This engagement with or re-imagining of Gay's poem took a wide variety of forms, but it is broadly speaking fair to say that Trivia went from being invoked as a source of advice in newspapers and guides to life in the city in the late eighteenth century, to being seen as a source of humour which articulated the true experience of the modern metropolis in the early nineteenth century. By the early Victorian period in turn, I will go on to argue, Gay's poem was increasingly regarded as a historical document, called upon to differentiate the improvements of the present from a past that was characterised by what one contributor to Charles Knight's London (1841–2) described as 'the overhanging houses, the alley-like streets, the din, the danger, and the filth surrounding the whole like another atmosphere'.1

The changing nature of people's experience of moving through London cannot be overestimated. London's population grew from around 900,000 in 1801 to over 1,500,000 in 1830,2 and this population growth was accompanied by a greater sense of social segregation. Representations of walking in the metropolis around this time seek to respond to the ways in which London, and one's experience of moving through its streets, altered drastically. The author of 'Thoughts upon Thoroughfares', for example, published in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine in 1825, begins his piece by invoking Le Mercier's observation of Paris that "On est étranger à son voisin!", before exploring how this rapid growth has created a breakdown in topographic, and with it social, cohesion.3 In this context, then, the 'art of walking in London' became shorthand for the vigilance required of the pedestrian in a rapidly expanding and increasingly congested metropolis.

Click for larger view
Figure 1.

George Cruickshank, Grievances of London (1812). Guildhall Library, City of London.

In the later appropriations and re-imaginings of Trivia to which I will refer, Gay's sense that it is possible to walk 'clean by Day, and safe by Night' no longer holds, and his ideas of politeness and civility, designed to ensure ease of movement for pedestrians, are likewise seen as impossibly anachronistic. What these works continually emphasise instead are encounter,...

LOS ANGELES FILM MAP BY DOROTHY

The UK-based design firm Dorothy created a vintage-y litho print map of Los Angeles that features film titles. Film Map includes over 900 film titles in the place of actual LA streets and sites, like Lost Highway, Forrest Gump, Nightmare on Elm Street, Jurassic Park, and Boulevard of Broken Dreams. The map also features an alphabetized key at the bottom that lists all of the films with their release dates and directors.


Read more at Design Milk: http://design-milk.com/los-angeles-film-map-by-dorothy/#ixzz2O2ItXW3w

I love maps that are hung on the wall as artwork, especially when you think of the painstaking task each map takes to complete. This clever rendition is no exception.

Read more at Design Milk: http://design-milk.com/los-angeles-film-map-by-dorothy/#ixzz2O2J1zx5l 

Maybe it's time for me to do something when people feel tired of their life.

" When a man is tired of London he is tired of life, for  there is in London all that life can afford."

                                                                                                                  ------  Samuel Johnson
What is the this sentence real meaning?

It remained me of the Happiness survey that i mentioned in the early journal. People live in big city feel less happy than people live in the same city and countryside.

As a designer, hoping her works based on the real life and can also be useful in the daily life.

So, i need to push myself in this crowed place.

LONDON:
"Sir, if you wish to have a just notion of the magnitude of this city, you must not be satisfied with seeing its great streets and squares, but must survey the innumerable little lanes and courts. It is not in the showy evolutions of buildings, but in the multiplicity of human habitations which are crowded together, that the wonderful immensity of London consists."

LONDON; SCOTLAND

Johnson: "The happiness of London is not to be conceived but by those who have been in it. I will venture to say, there is more learning and science within the circumference of ten miles from where we now sit, than in all the rest of the world." Boswell: "The only disadvantage is the great distance at which people live from one another." Johnson: "Yes, Sir, but that is occasioned by the largeness of it, which is the cause of all the other advantages." Boswell:"Sometimes I have been in the humour of wishing to retire to a desart." Johnson: "Sir, you have desart enough in Scotland."

LONDON:

"A country gentleman should bring his lady to visit London as soon as he can, that they may have agreeable topicks for conversation when they are by themselves."
Boswell: Life

LONDON; Stimulation
I mentioned to him that I had become very weary in a company where I heard not a single intellectual sentence, except "that a man who had been settled ten years in Minorca was become a much inferiour man to what he was in London, because a man's mind grows narrow in a narrow place." Johnson: "A man's mind grows narrow in a narrow place, whose mind is enlarged only because he has lived in a large place: but what is got by books and thinking is preserved in a narrow place as well as in a large place. A man cannot know modes of life as well in Minorca as in London; but he may study mathematicks as well in Minorca."
Boswell: Life

"My Way"-- Julie Michel

---- A beautiful and useful map

"My Way" designed by Julie Michel, she's this mapping work really makes me exciting, it not break the traditional maps beautifully but also very useful.  It gives me a idea of my flower mapping work that i need to consider more about useful of map. Maybe my map can also use in the ravel time.

My Way, an object of personal cartography, is designed to give tourists a physical and mental experience of the space they are visiting. It is a city map that contains blank areas on which to write. Due to its folding system, there empty spaces do not interfere with the map's legibility because they are hidden behind the paper folds. The design reintroduces the idea of discovery, research curiosity, and even getting lost. The map directs the tourist in space but also in time because it can be used to plan the trip before it even begins, during travel for writing and drawing, and back at home as a souvenir.

Before I first moved to London, I went to my local library and photocopied all the pages of the area around where I would go to college, and taped them all together into a kind of monster wall hanging. Fluorescent filled areas for parks and bits of interest, and village areas ringed. Staring at the areas and getting familiar with the names was essential for beginning the trawl through rental adverts. So when I came across these maps from Julie Michel, it all came back to me. the personalisation of an area to visit with stickers and interventions. She has found some neat ways of folding the maps too.... so check out the rest of the site as well.