First, an apology for recommending a book about London. Non-Londoners can be vexed by the attention the capital gets; and, after all, while this newspaper may live in London, its roots are in Manchester.
However, there are many lessons to be learned from this extraordinary title. They may be of debatable utility if you live in, say, Orkney, but you will certainly be diverted. The cover promises “100 maps and graphics that will change how you view the city”. And they do.
Cheshire is a geographer; Uberti a designer. Together they have managed to create something that I hesitate to call mindblowing, but it is certainly mind-expanding. Take, for example, the map of London on pp44-45 (the maps are almost all iterations of London), which illustrates the populations of the city by day and night. The data here are banal: there are more people in the middle of town by day than at night because they have jobs there. Big deal. But this fact is represented by rendering the peaks and troughs of population in the style of the radio-pulse image on the cover of Joy Division’s first album, Unknown Pleasures, and the huge spike in numbers occupying the City, Oxford Circus and Covent Garden towers over the rest of the city as if it were the Shard, or the Dark Tower in Tolkien’s Middle-earth. It is an image better seen than described, and it is almost frightening.
Maps do change the way we think. As the authors put it on page 158, Harry Beck’s tube map “remains so effective that it seems to make sense to take the tube at every opportunity”, but the map here showing the distance in walking time between central tube stations tells us different. Incidentally, the writers missed an opportunity with a map showing that fewer people take the tube south of the river – they could have explained that the reason there are so few stations there is because the ground is much harder to bore tunnels through.
But this book not only changes the way we think, it shows us how we think. The graphic on page 163 of boroughs by wellbeing (people were asked questions such as, “Overall, how anxious did you feel yesterday?”) shows these moods as stylised emoticons, and never have emoticons made me laugh so much. The overall mood may as well be called a big “Meh”, which goes some way to explaining the book’s epigraph, chosen from Bill Bryson: “I can never understand why Londoners fail to see that they live in the most wonderful city in the world”. Blessed are those in Bromley, who look so happy they could be on ecstasy, but pity the inhabitants of Lambeth, upon whom it would seem all the ends of the world are come. Then again, the unfortunate people of Islington, on the other side of town, appear only a footfall away from suicide. There is also a graphic representation of suicides on the underground. Many will be unsurprised to hear that the most suicide-prone line is the Northern.
I didn’t know there was a Ministry of Stories in Hoxton that collects tales written by local children; we are told they are more likely to use the word “zombie” than “vampire”, fairly useless knowledge but strangely touching. Or that there are, including his preliminary sketches and watercolours, 39,389 works by Turner at the Tate (the Tate website says 41,859), and that they are viewable online. The graphic showing this is a huge reproduction of The Burning of the Houses of Parliament, with much tinier boxes indicating all the other artists held at the gallery.
So this is much more than a coffee table book: within it are wonders. A single, continuous 50km high street from Uxbridge to Romford? Get out of here. But there it is.
• London: The Information Capital is published by Penguin. To order a copy for £12.29 (RRP £14.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
