![London A - Z - street atlas book cover](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7f/London_A_-_Z_-_street_atlas_book_cover.png)
Phyllis Isobella Pearsall
MBE (25 September 1906 – 28 August 1996) was a British painter and writer who founded the
Geographers' A-Z Map Company, for which she is regarded as one of the most successful business people of the twentieth century.
She has erroneously been credited with creating London's first popular indexed street map.
Early life and education
She was born Phyllis Isobella Gross in
East Dulwich
East Dulwich is an area of South East London, England in the London Borough of Southwark. It forms the eastern part of Dulwich, with Peckham to the east and Camberwell to the north. This South London suburb was first developed in the nineteent ...
, London on 25 September 1906. Her father, Alexander Gross (originally Grosz), was a Hungarian-Jewish immigrant and her mother, Isabella Crowly, an Irish-Italian Roman Catholic
suffragette, whose parents disapproved of the match. Phyllis Gross was baptised a Roman Catholic.
She grew up with her older brother, the artist
Anthony Gross
Anthony Imre Alexander Gross (19 March 1905 – 8 September 1984) was a British printmaker, painter, war artist and film director of Hungarian-Jewish, Italian, and Anglo-Irish descent.Thomas, RonanWest End at War: Anthony Gross Retriev ...
, in London and travelled all over Europe from an early age. Her father founded the
cartographic
Cartography (; from grc, χάρτης , "papyrus, sheet of paper, map"; and , "write") is the study and practice of making and using maps. Combining science, aesthetics and technique, cartography builds on the premise that reality (or an im ...
company
Geographia Ltd, which produced, among others, street maps of most British towns and although successful, eventually went bankrupt; Gross re-launched the company in the United States as the
Geographia Map Company a few years later.
Her parents had a very tense marriage which soon dissolved. Her mother remarried but died some years later in an asylum.
Phyllis Gross was educated at
Roedean School
Roedean School is an independent day and boarding school founded in 1885 in Roedean Village on the outskirts of Brighton, East Sussex, England, and governed by Royal Charter. It is for girls aged 11 to 18. The campus is situated near the Sus ...
, a private
boarding school near
Brighton, which she had to leave when her father went bankrupt. She then became an English tutor in France, at a small school in
Fécamp
Fécamp () is a commune in the Seine-Maritime department in the Normandy region in north-western France.
Geography
Fécamp is situated in the valley of the river Valmont, at the heart of the Pays de Caux, on the Alabaster Coast. It is aroun ...
,
Normandy
Normandy (; french: link=no, Normandie ; nrf, Normaundie, Nouormandie ; from Old French , plural of ''Normant'', originally from the word for "northman" in several Scandinavian languages) is a geographical and cultural region in Northwestern ...
. Later, she studied at the
Sorbonne
Sorbonne may refer to:
* Sorbonne (building), historic building in Paris, which housed the University of Paris and is now shared among multiple universities.
*the University of Paris (c. 1150 – 1970)
*one of its components or linked institution, ...
, spending her first few months in Paris, sleeping rough before moving to a
bedsit where she met the writer
Vladimir Nabokov
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov (russian: link=no, Владимир Владимирович Набоков ; 2 July 1977), also known by the pen name Vladimir Sirin (), was a Russian-American novelist, poet, translator, and entomologist. Bor ...
. She started working as a shop assistant in a big department store, selling gloves.
She married Richard Pearsall, an artist friend of her brother. They were together for eight years, travelling in Spain and living in Paris, when she left him in Venice while he was asleep, without telling him anything. She did not remarry.
Start of mapping
By 1935, Pearsall had become a portrait painter but became lost in London while using the latest map she could find, which was 17 years old. This stimulated her to produce a new map to cover the rapidly expanding area of London, including places of interest such as museums, bus routes etc.
Pearsall claimed that the work involved walking 3,000 miles to check the names of the 23,000 streets of London, waking up at 5am every day, and not going to bed until after an 18-hour working day.
In her autobiography she points to one novelty: "House numbers along main roads; I've walked them from start to finish; you won't find them on any other London map." It is often claimed to be the first indexed London street map, but this claim is easily refuted by reference to Bartholomew's Reference Atlas of London and Suburbs, which was published and widely available from 1908 onwards. The first Pearsall A-Z claimed on its front cover to include "9,000 more
treetsthan any similar atlas index", but in fact it had almost the same number of streets as the Bartholomew's version.
The map was drawn using the 72 6" Ordnance Survey maps for London dating from 1919 by her father's cartographer, Mr Fountain, updated by visits to the LCC planning offices. In 1936, when her map was complete, she printed 10,000 copies and began contacting bookstores who might sell it. She tried
Hatchards
Hatchards claims to be the oldest bookshop in the United Kingdom, founded on Piccadilly in 1797 by John Hatchard. After one move, it has been at the same location on Piccadilly next to Fortnum & Mason since 1801, and the two stores are also nei ...
in Piccadilly,
Selfridges
Selfridges, also known as Selfridges & Co., is a chain of high-end department stores in the United Kingdom that is operated by Selfridges Retail Limited, part of the Selfridges Group of department stores. It was founded by Harry Gordon Selfridg ...
, where they would not see her without an appointment, and
Foyles
W & G Foyle Ltd. (usually called simply Foyles) is a bookseller with a chain of seven stores in England. It is best known for its flagship store in Charing Cross Road, London. Foyles was once listed in the '' Guinness Book of Records'' as th ...
. None of them would take it. Next she went to
W H Smith
WHSmith (also written WH Smith, and known colloquially as Smith's and formerly as W. H. Smith & Son) is a British retailer, headquartered in Swindon, England, which operates a chain of high street, railway station, airport, port, hospital and ...
where, after being snubbed for days by an office junior, she received an order for 1,250 copies, which she delivered using a hand barrow borrowed from the pub next door. They sold well and within weeks she was taking regular orders to every main railway station in London.
F. W. Woolworth took a few thousand copies too. By 1938 the London A-Z was well-established. Until her father's death in 1958, all copies included the words "Produced under the direction of Alexander Gross, F.R.G.S."; he was not actually involved but it was hoped that he would find the acknowledgement useful.
Compact and convenient maps of cities have a history which goes back centuries, but Pearsall's A to Z map was a marketing success in its clean, simple and efficient design and cover.
During the
Second World War
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposi ...
, when selling maps to the public was forbidden, she worked for the Ministry of Information. There was also limited production of maps of the war fronts, but this was a hard time for her fledgling company.
In 1945, returning from a trip to Amsterdam where they were printing a new edition of the London map to get round shortages of paper in England, she was involved in a plane crash which left her with permanent scars.
Later years
In 1966, she turned her company, the Geographers' A–Z Map Co, into a trust to ensure that it was never bought out. This secured the future of her company and its employees. Through her donation of her shares to the trust, she was able to enshrine her desired standards and behaviours for the company into its statutes.
A respected
typographer
Typography is the art and technique of arranging type to make written language legible, readable and appealing when displayed. The arrangement of type involves selecting typefaces, point sizes, line lengths, line-spacing ( leading), an ...
, although not credited with the design of any
typeface
A typeface (or font family) is the design of lettering that can include variations in size, weight (e.g. bold), slope (e.g. italic), width (e.g. condensed), and so on. Each of these variations of the typeface is a font.
There are thousands o ...
s, her arrangement of type is considered one of the most interesting of her age. The 'A to Z' type-style for street names was for decades a conspicuously hand-drawn
sans-serif. She designed the type for a few children's
encyclopaedias and some other titles, though her slant was always toward publishing.
She wrote about her early days in ''From Bedsitter to Household Name'', published by her own company. She was awarded an
MBE in The Queen's Birthday Honours of 1986. She was involved with the company she founded, as well as painting prolifically, until her death.
In her later years, she lived in
Shoreham-by-Sea
Shoreham-by-Sea (often shortened to Shoreham) is a coastal town and port in West Sussex, England.
The town is bordered to its north by the South Downs, to its west by the Adur Valley and to its south by the River Adur and Shoreham Beach on th ...
, West Sussex, and died of cancer on 28 August 1996, a month before her 90th birthday.
Legacy
BBC Radio 4
BBC Radio 4 is a British national radio station owned and operated by the BBC that replaced the BBC Home Service in 1967. It broadcasts a wide variety of spoken-word programmes, including news, drama, comedy, science and history from the BBC' ...
broadcast in 2000 a dramatisation by Lucy Catherine of Phyllis Pearsall's life in 1936. A biography, ''Mrs P’s Journey'' by Sarah Hartley, was published by in 2001.
In 2005
Southwark Council placed a
blue plaque on the house where she was born in Court Lane Gardens, Dulwich.
In 2012
Crossrail
Crossrail is a railway construction project mainly in central London. Its aim is to provide a high-frequency hybrid commuter rail and rapid transit system crossing the capital from suburbs on the west to east, by connecting two major railway l ...
named one of its first pair of
tunnel boring machines
A tunnel boring machine (TBM), also known as a "mole", is a machine used to excavate tunnels with a circular cross section through a variety of soil and rock strata. They may also be used for microtunneling. They can be designed to bore throu ...
(TBMs) Phyllis to honour Pearsall's memory. The other machine was named Ada, after
Ada Lovelace.
In 2014 a musical about Phyllis Pearsall, ''
The A-Z of Mrs P'', written by
Diane Samuels and
Gwyneth Herbert
Gwyneth Herbert (born 26 August 1981) is a British singer-songwriter, composer, multi-instrumentalist and record producer. Initially known for her interpretation of jazz and swing standards, she is now established as a writer of original comp ...
, was performed at
Southwark Playhouse
Southwark Playhouse is a theatre in London, located between Borough and Elephant and Castle tube stations.
History
The Southwark Playhouse Theatre Company was founded in 1993 by Juliet Alderdice and Tom Wilson. They identified the need for a ...
.
See also
*''
The A-Z of Mrs P''
*''
Geographers' A-Z Map Company''
References
Bibliography
*
*
*
External links
Geographers' A–Z Map CompanyPhyllis Pearsall — Map Designer Design Museum
Heald, Claire (25 September 2006) "From Aaron Hill to Zoffany St" ''
BBC News
BBC News is an operational business division of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) responsible for the gathering and broadcasting of news and current affairs in the UK and around the world. The department is the world's largest broad ...
''. Retrieved 17 November 2021.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Pearsall, Phyllis
1906 births
1996 deaths
20th-century English non-fiction writers
20th-century English women writers
20th-century English women artists
British people of Hungarian-Jewish descent
British people of Irish descent
British people of Italian descent
Deaths from cancer in England
English cartographers
English Roman Catholics
English typographers and type designers
English women painters
Members of the Order of the British Empire
People educated at Roedean School, East Sussex
People from East Dulwich
University of Paris alumni
Women cartographers
Women graphic designers
20th-century cartographers