A tribute to not getting lost. Or – How I drew the North London Arts Map

Human beings have always had an instinct to map their surroundings. Order from chaos. Significance from nothingness.

The first petroglyphs on stone depicted agricultural crops, carved by the village shamen on behalf of the people, a right-rumpus pleading with the Gods to see that crops did not fail. These maps were not topographically accurate, but that was not the point – a graphic portrayal of the plot of land was in itself enough.

Three and a half thousand years later, the psychogeographical maps propounded by Guy Debord (left) of the Lettrist International, Paris 1950s, have become less flâneur, more flan – served up to the mainstream, given as a set exercise to sixth form art students nationwide. Space is the place. You are here. A map is a map… yet a map doesn’t always look like a Road Atlas.

Vishnu’s Footprints As Constellations Of His Earthly Symbols is an 18th century Indian map showing the patterned soles of a pair of human feet. It’s incredible. Likewise, wondrous are the hallucinogenic experiential maps (c the 1970s) representing the narcotically-induced visions of the Tukano Indians of the Amazon after they’d had a skinful of local plantlife. Far more than your A-Z, maps are everywhere, a bit like dogs.

I was asked to illustrate the North London Arts Map (NLAM) a couple of years ago as part of a drive by Enfield, Barnet and Haringey councils to show the vast wealth of arts venues in the borough. I had shown some illustration artwork at a gallery in Crouch End and they seemed to like it.

We chose a bird’s eye view, mapping the land as if a particularly cultural eagle was showing us the way. The sheer amount of venues in North London is extensive – before I drew the map I hadn’t realised that there was quite so much there. And the fact was there was too much information: too many venues and schemes who wanted to be in the NLAM. I’m not sure who sorted that bit of politics out, but I was given a list – sharpened my nib, washed down the inkwell – and off I went.

Part of the satisfaction of doing the map was, yes, despotic. There is a thrill in detailing and bringing to life your own kingdom – although the fact that it might not be yours and is actually run by Enfield Council seems academic in the heat of the cartographic moment. The NLAM took three areas and made them into one seamless Arts hotspot. The colours (muted greens, greys) I based on 1930s Underground poster art. The feel was meant to be of a pastoral utopia; Betjeman’s Metroland dotted with air-conditioned havens of visual and performance culture. Smiling citizens – classless, composed and multi-everythinged – appear in the parks and outside some of the venues on the map itself.

What I like is that the map’s gentle expanse is contained within major road systems – up top is the fumy behemoth that is the M25 – and the map is split in half by no-less fumy the North Circular. No attempt is made to hide the urban urbaness of the thing itself. I’m certain that even modern psychogeography’s Number One, Mr Iain Sinclair, would find it as much of a Bunyanesque pilgrimage as he apparently did the M25.

I wonder, had Grayson Perry been given the North London map to draw, would he have given it his trademark semi-allegorical, semi-dystopian touch? Yes. Mindless Perry would have merely added some half-cut hoodies sitting next to empty cans of alcopops by Ally Pally. Similarly, I imagine should Banksy have created the NLAM he would have replaced the requisite roads and venues with a large picture of the Burger King logo, alongside the figure of Ronald Reagan smiling at David Cameron going to the toilet. And call it ‘After Duchamp’.

Maps have played an extensive role in outsider art – as escape, as reinvention. Swiss-born Adolf Wölfli (1864-1930) re-presented his miserable childhood (terrible abuse, anonymous foster homes from the age of ten) as a magnificent travelog. After twice being arrested for attempted sexual assault he was diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1895. Once inside Waldau Mental Asylum, in Bern, Switzerland, he created a fictitious history for himself, From the Cradle to the Grave (page count: 3000), which had him renaming himself Doufi and saw him exploring the world, drawing fantasy maps of his adventure (left) with such intensity and detail that he is now one of the handful of names synonymous with Art Brut.

The NLAM has gone from a physical, fold-out map to a website to an annual brochure… and still my the pen is itching. I am yearning to stretch is out – as if it were a cartographical piece of chewing gum – to Camden Town, Kentish Town (my own neighbourhood), even (well, maybe) Islington…. The array of arts venues and organisations… the travels we can have… the finer detail to be recorded and noted down…The map is telling me, whispering to me in the dead of night, “come move my boundaries…”

If not, the local Kentish Town shaman reliably informs me that our cultural now-ness will go unrecorded, the crops could possibly fail and he won’t have any peyote in till next Tuesday.