The Hand-drawn Map Shop
Somewhere in my house is a business card from 'The Hand-Drawn Map Shop’, which opened in Brighton for a few years in the 90s. The card has the shop’s name and opening hours on the front, but no phone number or address. Its location is given by a few labelled and intersecting lines on the back that represent streets. One has the number 73 drawn on it, enough to lead you to the shop’s location in a North Laine backstreet.
Inside were hundreds of hand-drawn maps. Some were produced by artists, others had been handed in, or offered as part-exchange. The maps ranged from simple routes to parties through to artists charting their home towns. I loved flicking through the racks and I wish I'd had the money then to buy things from the shop.
Also lost in my house is a map drawn for me at a party, showing the location to a bar called the Leche Vin. I had told a woman I was off to Paris that next week and she said I had to visit that particular place. I managed to leave the map behind when I left. It was only good fortune that had me passing the bar while wandering around Bastille.
The Leche Vin's windows were decorated in fairy-lights and the walls inside were covered with religious ephemera. On going to the toilet after a few drinks, you found a dark room with a squat toilet, where the walls were decorated with hard-core pornography.
We no longer need hand-drawn maps now we have digital ones. You can find any place with just its name. But I miss people drawing maps for me.
Background
I recently read Kathleen Jamie's Cairn, a lovely collection of poems alongside what she refers to as micro-essays. I often find nature writing hard to get into, so this book wasn’t as effective for me as it was for other people. But there was a piece of memoir, sketched on two pages, that I loved.
Jamie’s book is a wonderful demonstration of the micro-essay’s potential. This piece is my reponse, about Brighton and Paris in the 90s. I loved visiting the Leche Vin, and it appears to still exist, although I've not been for over 20 years.
A lot of my recent writing seems to be about the 90s. I guess everyone remembers their teens/twenties as a vivid time; and I find it strange that this period is as long ago now as the 60s was then. It's a sort of temporal vertigo.
I watched Closer recently. I didn't love it, but I was fascinated about how different millennial London looked. People smoking in a gallery. No screens in the streets, no smartphones. I was working in a web agency at the time, and things felt futuristic. Now it all looks like a period piece.
Recommendations
I have a couple of books on hand-drawn maps. From Here to There is a beautiful collection, gathered by The Hand-Drawn Map Association. I also have a copy of Hand-Drawn Maps: A Guide for Creatives, Helen Cann’s guide to making maps.
I knew Helen in Brighton through the Draw crew, and remember an exhibition of her work at the Onca gallery. Some of her pieces are online - an intricate maps of Brighton, a series of nautical maps produced as part of a residency and some migration maps made for Lia Leendertz’s 2021 Almanac. But my favourite pieces were the echolocation maps which used data about the flight paths of Barbastelle bats in Sussex.