The cultural uses of the A-Z London street atlas: navigational performance and the imagining of urban form
For a decade from the late 1990s, the A-Z London street atlas became a recurrent motif within art works and popular media texts. This essay collates and explores these cultural responses to the atlas, to consider what this might reveal about the affective dimensions of ordinary urban way-finding. Th...
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| Format: | Article |
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SAGE
2016
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| Online Access: | https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/32550/ |
| _version_ | 1848794432745242624 |
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| author | Hornsey, R. |
| author_facet | Hornsey, R. |
| author_sort | Hornsey, R. |
| building | Nottingham Research Data Repository |
| collection | Online Access |
| description | For a decade from the late 1990s, the A-Z London street atlas became a recurrent motif within art works and popular media texts. This essay collates and explores these cultural responses to the atlas, to consider what this might reveal about the affective dimensions of ordinary urban way-finding. There were three persistent motifs that ran through these diverse works: a basic fascination with the destruction of the atlas, the foregrounding of a stoic or heroic pedestrian figure, and the attachment of the atlas to a projected network of mobile individuals that connected on the streets at random times and places. An interrogation of these tropes reveals how the A-Z became a means to explore the terms of an expanded pedestrian experience, as well as a possible configuration of metropolitan movement and contact. Furthermore, the popularity of these texts points to an excess of affect that might have become embedded within acts of A-Z way-finding. Using, owning or being seen with the atlas briefly became a potential mechanism for imagining one’s contribution to a mobile metropolitan community. Hence, this essay is both a focussed exploration of street-atlas poetics and an attempt to think more deeply about the cultural dynamics of everyday urban navigation. |
| first_indexed | 2025-11-14T19:16:06Z |
| format | Article |
| id | nottingham-32550 |
| institution | University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus |
| institution_category | Local University |
| last_indexed | 2025-11-14T19:16:06Z |
| publishDate | 2016 |
| publisher | SAGE |
| recordtype | eprints |
| repository_type | Digital Repository |
| spelling | nottingham-325502020-05-04T17:38:50Z https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/32550/ The cultural uses of the A-Z London street atlas: navigational performance and the imagining of urban form Hornsey, R. For a decade from the late 1990s, the A-Z London street atlas became a recurrent motif within art works and popular media texts. This essay collates and explores these cultural responses to the atlas, to consider what this might reveal about the affective dimensions of ordinary urban way-finding. There were three persistent motifs that ran through these diverse works: a basic fascination with the destruction of the atlas, the foregrounding of a stoic or heroic pedestrian figure, and the attachment of the atlas to a projected network of mobile individuals that connected on the streets at random times and places. An interrogation of these tropes reveals how the A-Z became a means to explore the terms of an expanded pedestrian experience, as well as a possible configuration of metropolitan movement and contact. Furthermore, the popularity of these texts points to an excess of affect that might have become embedded within acts of A-Z way-finding. Using, owning or being seen with the atlas briefly became a potential mechanism for imagining one’s contribution to a mobile metropolitan community. Hence, this essay is both a focussed exploration of street-atlas poetics and an attempt to think more deeply about the cultural dynamics of everyday urban navigation. SAGE 2016-04-01 Article PeerReviewed Hornsey, R. (2016) The cultural uses of the A-Z London street atlas: navigational performance and the imagining of urban form. cultural geographies, 23 (2). pp. 265-280. ISSN 1477-0881 A-Z cartography imagined communities London way-finding http://cgj.sagepub.com/content/23/2/265 doi:10.1177/1474474015572600 doi:10.1177/1474474015572600 |
| spellingShingle | A-Z cartography imagined communities London way-finding Hornsey, R. The cultural uses of the A-Z London street atlas: navigational performance and the imagining of urban form |
| title | The cultural uses of the A-Z London street atlas: navigational performance and the imagining of urban form |
| title_full | The cultural uses of the A-Z London street atlas: navigational performance and the imagining of urban form |
| title_fullStr | The cultural uses of the A-Z London street atlas: navigational performance and the imagining of urban form |
| title_full_unstemmed | The cultural uses of the A-Z London street atlas: navigational performance and the imagining of urban form |
| title_short | The cultural uses of the A-Z London street atlas: navigational performance and the imagining of urban form |
| title_sort | cultural uses of the a-z london street atlas: navigational performance and the imagining of urban form |
| topic | A-Z cartography imagined communities London way-finding |
| url | https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/32550/ https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/32550/ https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/32550/ |