London

What is the London linocut map?

Mark Andrew Webber’s London map is a two-colour typographic linocut, 90 × 106 cm on Hahnemühle, cut for the 2006 London Design Festival. Limited edition of 100 (10 remaining at £500 on the live shop). It later formed part of the Art Directors Club of New York Silver Cube win with New York and Amsterdam.

This is the second map. After New York I was asked to make a typographic piece for the London Design Festival in 2006 — My City, My London, an exhibition by the International Society of Typographic Designers.

Eighteen designers were invited to make work about their relationship with the city. The show included Derek Birdsall, Margaret Calvert, Alan Kitching, and the late, great Alan Fletcher. Mine was cut from a single sheet of linoleum: the names I wanted in, and enough space left that they could still be read.

New York, London and Amsterdam were later entered for the Art Directors Club of New York and won a Silver Cube in 2008, which is what turned the maps into a body of work rather than a college project. A few years on, Annalise Fard, then director of Home at Harrods, named this print her favourite thing in an Evening Standard interview.