After Tuesday’s post about 1930s London maps, I thought a contemporary definition could be looked at. Seven years ago Chaz Hutton doodled a map on a post-it note, he then posted it on Twitter [featured image] and 48 hours later it had 3,000 re-tweets.
He described it as:

A map of people’s experience of living in cities: The changing circumstances of people as they get older and have children, the way ‘cool’ areas emerge from formerly ‘rough’ areas and are then invariably compared to the less-cool, traditionally wealthy areas, the kind of areas that an Ikea needs to be built for it to be profitable. All these things are endemic to most large cities, with most of them the outcomes of events situated at some point along the gentrification arc.
Since that map appeared there’s been a lot of speculation as to which city he drew. Chaz claims that it is a generic representation, and as many cities have a river running through them, he could be right. Curiously everyone managed to find their own cities within the same map.
Although the original conception of the idea for the style of the map did originally stem from a map of London, and the river has the same proportions, the diagram could apply to most cities.
Below is the refined version, I’ll leave it to you to decide what city it represents.


I couldn’t enlarge the map here, so looked it up online. I can see why some people think it is London, and also why most people in any city can identify with it.
And I have no doubt that there is a part (or many parts) of North London where South Londoners like me are described as ‘Twats’, and that probably stems from football supporters’ hatred.
As for Ikea, it would be the only reason I ever went north to Brent Park. 🙂
Best wishes, Pete.
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You should have visited the sunny uplands of North London, probably you’d get less abuse than working for the London Ambulance Service.
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Other than a year at Wimbledon Ambulance Station before transferring to the NW Division of the LAS, I worked all of my career north of the river, mostly based in Ladbroke Grove. For short periods, I also worked out of ambulance stations in Willesden, Park Royal, Smithfield, Bloomsbury, St John’s Wood, Fulham, Camden, and Kenton. Until 1997, I commuted from South London using motorbikes or scooters to get to work.
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