A 1920s edition of Macdonald Gill's seminal and highly influential pictorial map of London.



Gill's extraordinarily influential London 'Wonderground' map was derived from his own earlier, larger map first issued in 1914. This map caused a sensation when it was first produced as an advertisement for the use of London Underground outside of peak hours and as a method of leisure as opposed to commuter travel. Its mixture of extraordinary size, bright colour and surreal humour reminiscent to Alice in Wonderland struck a chord with the public and made it an immediate success. So much so, that it was re-issued for decades as a commercial piece albeit in a slightly smaller format. The printer for these earlier editions before 1920 was G.W. Bacon although the copyright owner was Gerard T. Meynell of the Westminster Press who was also the publisher. Bacon's name disappeared from the later editions but Meynell and the Westminster Press remained on the map throughout.



By the early 1920s the map had been reduced in size again and the captions in the ribbons around the map changed. It is possible that these changes, especially the reduction in size, were made to make it more accessible to the general public for purchase and display.



Fundamentally though, the map remained the same, advertising the city as a place for leisure and as an area of wonder, with its sports events, historic buildings and quirky character; the latter is emphasized with multiple scenes of surreal humour such as the fugitive tiger in St. John's Wood, reciting William Blake's poem "Tyger, Tyger" and the polo players in their field at Hurlingham in Fulham, practicing their secondary sport of 'hurling ham' into the air, claiming that "next to polo, hurling ham is good sport".



There has been a great rise in the appreciation of Gill and his work, resulting in further research and analysis of his maps. One article has analysed several slight differences in a small section on the upper left corner of the map, geographically, on the Harrow Road towards Wembley. Events current to the 1920s are a great aid in dating the multiple editions of the map. This example of the map shows a sign-post showing "on to Wembley" with the image of a British heraldic lion next to it; the caption on the ribbon above this corner has been changed to "The Heart of Britain's Empire" as opposed to "By Paying us your Pennies", which appeared on the earlier editions. This is a reference to the highly successful British Empire Exhibition held in Wembley in 1924. The exhibition was enormously popular and attracted a huge amount of visitors to London. It is certainly within the bounds of possibility that Gill and his publishers issued a new, smaller version of this map specifically designed to be sold as a commemorative souvenir of the Exhibition. Indeed, the map was originally issued in an envelope which specifically illustrated this upper northwest section of London where the exhibition was held.



The influence of both Gill and this map was vast; it caught the imagination of artists around the world with similarly inspired maps being produced by Cowdroy and Lloyd in Australia, Olsen and Clark in the United States and S. H. Maw in Canada among many others. This would ultimately lead to the Golden Age of Pictorial Mapmaking in the 1920s and 30s.



Printed colour. Laid down on archival linen. [LDN6958]