Quasi quasi mi leggo Londra

16th September 2014/0/0

Article on our map in La Stampa! See it here.

Here’s a translation:

I almost read London

A new map graphics fixed more than 250 literary places in the British capital. A gripping read by authors and characters, but also a puzzle to solve

The Literary Map of London was created by a collaboration between the artist and graphic designer Dex
interior Anna Burles. The map, along with other works of art created by the same concept graph, you can buy it on the website runforthehills.bigcartel.com

05/09/2014
VITTORIO SABADIN

Who loves English literature can go to London for weeks looking for the places of his favorite writers. We organize tour even theme: there is a certain time to a metro stop and walk in the footsteps of Charles Dickens, George Orwell, Virginia Woolf, guided by an expert that shows things that just do not ever would notice .They always travel exciting: to see the places described in the books that we loved creates an even stronger bond, a feeling of complicity intimacy with the author.

Lacked a guide to literary London, but now there is. It ‘a beautiful map created by artist chart “Dex” and the interior designer Anna Burles, a puzzle which contains thousands of names in quotation of 250 works, which are located in the place where the character lived or acted. It should perhaps be a little ‘fans of English writers, but it can be really fun to look up the names and find out the reasons that bind them to a certain location on the map.

The name that stands out the most, for greatness, is to Sherlock Holmes, which covers Regents Park, Marylebone Road, and of course Baker Street, where he lived, inexistent number 221B, the most famous detective in the world. After the success of the books by Arthur Conan Doyle, the 221B has been forcibly inserted between numbers 237 and 241, and in the house you can visit a reproduction of the study of Victorian Sherlock, with an adjoining laboratory.

Moll Flanders was placed along the Thames, where stood the brutal Newgate prison that housed his mother in the novel by Daniel Defoe. The building on the corner of Newgate Street and Old Bailey was well known to the writer, who spent a few weeks because of his political activities. Just in Newgate, Defoe wrote the first notes of Moll Flanders , the prototype of the English novel: to describe how Moll was in prison, he had only to look around.

Peering through the grate in the cell of the hapless Flanders, you can see over the Thames the place to hang around Bill Sikes, the rude and uncouth criminal Oliver Twist . References to the masterpiece of Charles Dickens are among the most numerous. To the north, in the area of Liverpool Road, Oliver is mentioned with great visibility, because it was by the road that went to London. Nearby is also remembered Fagin, the character that Dickens copied by a thug true, Ikey Solomon, a “kidsman” which collected the boys from the streets and turn them into thieves and hold them to his court. Dickens is almost everywhere, in the neighborhoods of the East End, and in citations could not miss Ebenezer Scrooge, the miser arid ‘A Christmas Carol’ who lived in an unknown way, “a grim old tenement that was hiding in the bottom of a chiassuolo. ”

Phileas Fogg got along much better instead, with his friends at the exclusive Reform Club 104 Pall Mall. That ‘s where, between a card game and the other, made a bet with the other shareholders 50,000 pounds that would make a trip around the world in 80 days. He returned to the club on time, in the novel by Jules Verne (one of the few foreigners allowed in the map), at 8.45 on December 21, 1872 Fogg lived not far away, in Savile Row, and therefore did not have to go far to order a new dress.

On the literary map of London you can follow the tracks of nearly every major writer. There is the Bloomsbury Group, formed by Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, EM Forster and many other writers and artists. They met in Gordon Square and attended the old armchairs in the bar of the Hotel Russell, still one of the best places to write or chat. In front, there is the ominous facade of the University of London, George Orwell served as a model of the “Ministry of Truth” in 1984 .

We could not miss Peter Pan, placed at the height of Kensington Gardens, where he spent his childhood. There’s even Bridget Jones, placed above his home in Bedale Street, close to London Bridge tube station, and there is also James Bond, who in the novels of Fleming lived at Chelsea and went out on the King’s Road with his Bentley Blower 4 ½ of 1930, a car on which it’s really hard to imagine 007.

The map is full of mysteries to be solved pleasant and even unknown writers, but deserving. The Ben Jonson located on the Isle of Dogs, ahead of Greenwich, is the author with Thomas Nashe’s “The Isle of Dog,” a satirical comedy of 1597 that made fun of Queen Elizabeth I. It was shown only once and perpetrators were arrested. The text was destroyed and we do not know what to say. Good reasons to add one of the masterpieces of English literature.

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