Wednesday Picture: how did London’s first ever A-Z come to be sold in this Clapham shop?


Phyllis Pearsall Cavendish Road copy

So many amazing people have lived, and amazing things happened in our city that aren’t commemorated by blue plaques or monumental architecture. And one south London building that never fails to give me a warm glow, is this unremarkable grocery shop on Cavendish Road, by Clapham Common, pictured above. This is going to take a bit of explaining…

One of my all time heroes is Phyllis Pearsall, the woman who invented and published the A-Z map of London. And was here, in the 1937 incarnation of this very shop, that the first copies of it were sold.

Pearsall, who died in 1996, was a true visionary who led an extraordinary and eccentric life. My boyfriend jokes that everywhere we go in London I’ll excitedly tug his sleeve and tell him something that Phyllis did on that street. He exaggerates – but not by much; the fact is she did literally visit every street in London. More of which later.

Pearsall blue plaque Image by pomphorhynchus
Image by Pomphorhynchus

It’s hard to imagine what Elephant and Castle was like in Victorian times, with its grand sweeping streets, parks and posh cafes. It was in one of those cafes in 1900 that Pearsall’s Hungarian immigrant father Alexander Gross spotted an incredibly beautiful, fiery second generation half Italian half Irish waitress called Bella. He wasted no time in inviting himself round to her family’s Peckham home to meet her parents. The couple were soon married and set up business selling oil lamps around Clapham Junction and then Brixton. First daughter Phyllis arrived in 1906, born in Court Lane Gardens, Dulwich (where – hurrah – she does get herself a blue plaque, pictured above). The family heaved itself up through the class system: Pearsall’s father became a cartographer and eventually made his fortune by ingeniously selling illustrated war maps to the Daily Telegraph to enhance their reports of the progress of the First World War – something no newspaper had ever done before.

Pearsall – then, of course, still a Gross – unusually for the time, attended university. She studied at the Sorbonne in Paris and shared a down-at-heel boarding house with the young writer Nabokov. It has been suggested that her poker straight plaits inspired his most infamous creation, Lolita.

By the time by the time she’d finished, she’d walked absolutely every street in London; all 23,000 of them

After a short-lived marriage to the artist Richard Pearsall and all sorts of adventures, our heroine found herself back in London aged 30, working as a portrait painter. One evening she was invited to a well-to-do client’s home for dinner, in an unfamiliar part of west London. It was teeming with rain and the street signs weren’t brilliant. The house was on a long street and Pearsall had no idea which end her hosts lived. She was horribly late and soaked through by the time she arrived – but by the time she left she’d had an idea that every single Londoner has relied on ever since.

A-Z London, 1936Image via The Design Museum and reproduced by permission of Geographers' A-Z Map Co. Ltd
A-Z London, 1936
Image via The Design Museum and reproduced by permission of Geographers’ A-Z Map Co. Ltd

She had decided to create the first really comprehensive, user-friendly street map of London, clearly designed with the streets drawn proportionately larger than they are, for clarity. Where possible, the map would indicate which way the numbering system worked. She also wanted to make sure that railway and Tube stations would be clearly marked and that there’d be a clear index. You can see how this first edition looked, right.

Creating the map became an incredible labour of love – over the next year, she left her house at dawn every morning and returned late at night, by the time she’d finished, she’d walked absolutely every street in London; all 23,000 of them. Interestingly her father was unimpressed, telling his daughter her book would never work, but thanks to some of his colleagues (whom she’d met as a child), she was able to build the contacts she needed to get it made. She was an extraordinarily single-minded.

Once she’d had the map manufactured, then began the real slog of trying to get someone to stock it. She was sneered at and brushed off by most major shops who just couldn’t understand who would possibly buy such a map. At the end of her tether and on the brink of giving up, Pearsall started taking the map into small independent shops to see if she could find any takers.

And here we come full circle, as she eventually wandered into a small newsagent’s on the corner of Cavendish road and Clapham Common South. The shopkeeper, a Mrs Naylor, miraculously agreed to be the first person to buy one of Pearsall’s maps and showed her so much kindness that she was filled with the hope and strength she needed to keep going. Pearsall’s renewed tenacity soon led her to WH Smith’s who agreed to stock the maps at their train station stalls, and it was only a matter of time before the A-Z went on to become the roaring success we all know and love.

It seems incredible that such an ingenious invention was so hard to sell in the beginning and that without a kind word in Clapham, at the right moment, the A-Z may never have made it into our lives. And that’s why this unglamorous shop in south London never fails to make me smile.

Sources: Mrs P’s Journey, by Sarah Hartley; Open Plaques

Words: Holly Atkins Main image: Kate Burt


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