Squaring up to London ... Phyllis Pearsall,
with copies of her liberating invention
It really ought to be located somewhere much more challenging: Iris Avenue in Bexley, say, almost entirely devoured by the fold between pages 100 and 101, or square 7A of page 136, where Pixton Way runs chillingly out across that dark bourne into the land from which no traveller is ever likely to return: the edge of the last square.
But Court Lane Gardens, where a blue plaque marking the birthplace of the London A to Z's originator is being unveiled today, is easy peasy: cut down from Calton Avenue by Woodwarde Road and Druce Road and you're there.
I had never heard of Phyllis Pearsall MBE- and never was the honour better earned - when I first came to London from what was then the small, underpopulated city of Dublin. But she rescued me.
There was no indexed comprehensive street map to Dublin until long after that, but no need for one. You could walk across the city in half an hour. But London! I was a stranger in a vast and strange land. I was terrified to get onto buses which roared away in completely random directions and threw you off in terrifying labyrinths like Maida Vale, where all the streets looked identical and nobody knew their neighbour, much less the way to the Open Air Theatre in Regent's Park.
Then I discovered the A to Z, and I was free. Once I worked out which way was up I could go anywhere.
Phyllis Pearsall was born on square 7E of Page 94 in 1906, then as now an unimpeachably respectable address, which belied her exotic background. She was the child of a disapproved-of marriage between a Hungarian Jewish immigrant and an Irish Roman Catholic suffragette.
The match didn't stick, and she had a wandering childhood, studied to be a painter in Paris, married an artist at 16 and left him at 24. Back in London, aged 29, she got hopelessly lost on her way to paint a portrait - and found her true vocation.
The very next day she began a 3,000-mile walk through the 23,000 streets of the captial, starting at 5am and sometimes walking until midnight, sketching and taking notes every step of the way. One year later her first A to Z was published, and created an instant niche market which she filled by delivering copies all over London by wheelbarrow.
The much imitated, never bettered book has been a bestseller ever since. She continued to work until weeks before her death in 1996, just short of her 90th birthday.
You get a lot of odd types around Tottenham Court Road, so nobody turned a hair when I shouted "yesssssss!" and flapped a book over my head. The A to Z has some sort of problem, probably due to its troubled childhood, with Adam and Eve: thirty years earlier I discovered that a mere blink of an eyelid of an alleyway off Kensington High Street, Adam and Eve Passage, wasn't on the map. And there I was, standing in a malodorous little bit of city grot called Adam and Eve Court - and not a sign of it on the map. Don't tell me it was one of your cunning deliberate errors to confound plagiarists, Ms Pearsall, it was a gotcha moment of that purest joy, known only to map addicts and London pedestrians, "catching out the A to Z".
