Helen Kearney

The London Postal Map was introduced in 1856. It drew a boundary around London, and then divided the city into ten districts: EC, WC, N, NE, E, SE, S, SW, W and NW.

It was a technological innovation that greatly increased the speed and efficiency of the movement of post around London, in a period when the postal service was the primary form of communication. Service became incredibly quick, frequent, and accessible; almost as instantaneous as the internet today. Deliveries began at 7.22am, with deliveries on the hour, every hour throughout the day. Letters posted at 7.30pm in central London would reach outer London suburbs that same evening.

This thesis describes the origins of the Postal Map, and then explores its effects in the context of a rapidly developing city. It speculates on meanings of mapping the city where new names and boundaries are introduced and visualised. It investigates the development of the city, understanding the post as an essential part of London’s infrastructure. It considers how people experienced a city in which millions of letters, thousands of postmen, and hundreds of train carriages and mail carts were moving around each week. 

The Postal Map is argued to be one of the causal factors of modernity within London; it meant urban space was linked to a particular temporality – modern, fast-paced, connected. It changed how Londoner’s conceived their city through providing a new framework for labelling places in relation to each other – stating what was east, what was west.  

The project uses the extensive archives held by the British Postal Museum and Archive, which include hundreds of maps, to tell the story of the Postal Map. It combines methodologies from social history, technological and administrative histories, mapping theory, urban planning history, and design history to gain a rich understanding of the full spatial implications of this designed object: the London postal map.

In 1961, the graphic designer Robert Brownjohn, writing about lettering on buildings, signage and advertising – typography that has a relationship with architecture – stated:


‘…The fact is that we begin to see our cityscape not so much as architecture as three-dimensional typography.’


My dissertation looks at the practices of graphic design and architecture in Britain 1944–1965, investigating three instances in which large, brash, colourful lettering and graphic design made striking, obtrusive statements in the environment. Through this lens, I consider how architects and graphic designers theorised their surroundings – how space was comprehended, how environments were ‘read’, and how design should react to this.


My case studies are the illustrations of the town planner and sketch artist Gordon Cullen for the Architectural Review, the typographer Edward Wright’s lettering mural for an exhibition building in 1961, and Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert’s designs for road signage across Britain. Archival material is analysed in detail in order to revise the historical approach to this subject matter, and to construct a reading of the material that stresses – like Brownjohn, quoted above – that the environment was read through graphic statements.