Month: September 2026

When I moved to London, in the mid-1980s, one of my first purchases was a black and white copy of the A-to-Z, or, to use the full name, the Geographers’ A-Z Street Atlas for London.  This invaluable book comprised page after page of maps of the streets of London, showing also the rail and tube stations, together with the major buildings and monuments, and included an alphabetical street index.  So long as you knew the address of a place in London you could use the A-to-Z to find your way there without much risk of getting lost.  Soon, in addition, I acquired a small pocket-sized version with larger-scale colour maps, that covered the centre of the city, and a decade later I added a large format hardback with maps for the whole city and outer suburbs, which I kept in my newly acquired car. 

Nowadays I use physical maps only when I am out in the countryside, where an Ordnance Survey sheet provides rich detail, helping me to navigate off-road walking routes.  In London, I use a map app on my phone, which not only tells me exactly where I am, but also the most efficient way to travel to my destination.  When I open my phone map, it offers me a range of transport options, for example, whether I prefer to use the underground, the overground, or national rail services, or buses, and I can use a filter to select the cheapest option, or the route with the least walking. For some journeys, I might be offered information about trams or river taxis.  When I decide to walk, the app suggests two or three different routes and for each it gives me an estimated time for the trip.  There are also options for car drivers and for cyclists. 

The map app is a better piece of technology that the physical book of maps, and it is no surprise that most people in London use their phones to navigate the city.  Like all technologies, it is imperfect: if you lose your signal or your battery runs out, you risk getting lost.  But then, it was also possible to leave your copy of the A-to-Z on the bus or the tube, and find yourself in a part of London you had never visited before, without your trusty guidebook.  We all switched to using online maps because they are quicker, easier to use, and they update regularly to take account of changes to London’s streets and transport services.  And yet … the travel menu on my app is not as comprehensive as it might be, for there is nothing at all about travelling by horse.

Continue reading “Slow horses”

In the late-nineteenth and very-early-twentieth century, a series of novels was published that explored the relationship between Europe and America, the former characterised as a culture in a state of permanent if gradual decline, the latter characterised as a dynamic society that had not yet acquired much culture of its own.  The author of these works was Henry James, born in New England but longtime resident of ye Olde Englande, whose preferred structural device consisted of a wealthy young American woman – an heiress to some vast fortune, made by her father or some other benefactor – who meets a cultivated but impoverished European man – who might be English or Italian, or perhaps an Englishman who lives in Italy – and marries him, with mostly unsatisfactory consequences for her.  It turns out that European men with sophisticated taste but meagre financial resources, tended to marry rich American heiresses for their wealth rather than for their intellect and charm.  (Had rich British heiresses been available, no doubt they would have been married for similar reasons.)

I enjoy reading James’s novels, and when I reach their final pages I find myself feeling sorry for the spirited young women who have slowly discovered that possession of heaps of money guarantees neither an easy life nor a happy marriage, who find that European men are eager for access to their wealth but reluctant to give up anything much in return.  However, James described only a thin slice of English and American society, the sorts of people you find in Jane Austen rather than the wider range – both by geography and class – who appear in George Eliot or Charles Dickens.  He was also very much a nineteenth century author – born in 1843, his last major work of fiction was published in 1904 – whose world is no longer our world: his characters travel by steamship and horse-drawn carriage, and live in houses with gas lighting. 

Continue reading “Royal Highness”