John Lumgair

  Lions are not native to the Low Countries, but here is one particular specimen that is nevertheless very local. The Leo Belgicus is a lion transposed on a map of the area, its ferocity symbolizing the belligerence of a nation fighting for its life. Confusingly, that nation is not, as the name would suggest, Belgium. Nor is it the Netherlands. The modern acronym Benelux more accurately describes the entity depicted by the Leo belgicus: Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. In the 16th century, that general area was also known as the Seventeen Provinces, first under Burgundian and later Spanish tutelage. As the plural description suggests, these provinces were a loose confederation with little or no unifyingly ‘national’ sentiment. That changed when religious upheavals pitted the increasingly protestant and independent-minded locals against their staunchly catholic Spanish overlords. The old Roman toponym Belgica was used to provide the entire Low Countries with a single geographic denominator. The Austrian cartographer baron Michael Aitzinger, probably inspired by the prevalence of lions in the coats of arms of many of the Seventeen Provinces, drew the first Leo Belgicus in 1583, fifteen years into the Eighty Years’ War of the Spanish in the Netherlands. The long war soon became a stalemate, with neither party able to achieve total victory. At the Peace of Westphalia (1648), the de facto situation was officially recognised: seven provinces in the North had become an independent protestant republic, henceforth known to geography as Belgica foederata (the republican Netherlands), the South remained catholic and Spanish – and royal (Belgica regia). The Lion had been cut in half. The Leo belgicus exists in several forms. The oldest one is of a lion rampant, its head in the northeast of the Low Countries and its rear taking shape in the southwest. This original position might give a clue as to just how Aitzinger might have conceived of the Leo belgicus. The mouth of the lion corresponds roughly to a remarkably rectangular shape in the Dutch border with Germany (a 20 by 20 km square bordering Coevorden). A later version shows the Belgic Lion passant, with its head where its tail was, and vice versa. The map is oriented towards the west. The curving North Sea coast shapes the lion’s back. The lion’s less agressive pose reflects the Twelve Years’ Truce (1609-1621) between the Spanish and the Dutch. The Leo Belgicus symbolised a nation that never was – a Netherlands that also was a Belgium, and covered the territory of both now separate countries. The deepening of the intra-Netherlands split made the Leo Belgicus redundant. The curiosity lived on, though, as a Leo Hollandicus, adapted to reflect only the the province of Holland, core of the independent Dutch republic. 　   ————— (*) Roman Gallia Belgica covered the southern part of the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and parts of northern France and western Germany. Its name derived from the Belgae, a collection of Celtic/Germanic tribes. Belgica gave rise to the French term belgique (originally also an adjective, that later became a noun) and Belgium. (**) The Netherlands and the corresponding terms in other languages (Pays-Bas, die Niederlände) refers to the current country which, curiously, in its own language speaks of itself in singular form: Nederland. The plural de Nederlanden still refers to the larger, Benelux-sized territory.

It takes aspiring London cabbies two to four years to acquire ‘The Knowledge’. Only if they know their way around the 25,000 streets in a 6-mile radius from Charing Cross (and along 320 main roads within Greater London) will they be licensed to drive one of London’s iconic black cabs. The London Taxicab Examination System is reputed to be the hardest of its kind in the world, and this speaks to the complexity of the British capital’s road grid. That complexity, and the cabbies’ Knowledge, put passengers at the risk of being overcharged, the Victorians feared. Mid-19th century, even before the current Examination System was instituted (in 1865), a Mr John Leighton devised a system to prevent passengers from being taken for a proverbial as well as a literal ride. Leighton, a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, published a scheme to divide London in a number of hexagonals, specifically aimed at preventing overcharging by cab drivers. “John Leighton suggested that the old borough boundaries should be altered to conform to a honeycomb pattern. Within a 5-mile radius of the General Post Office all the sprawling, differently sized boroughs were to become hexagonal-shaped areas, 2 miles across. There were 19 altogether with the City in the centre of the honeycomb. Each hexagonal borough would be identified by a letter, and the letter as well as a number would be painted or cut out of tin-plate to be visible by day and night on lampposts at every street corner.” The proposal for a hexagonal London is described in London As It Might Have Been, a book by Felix Barber and Ralph Hyde, also detailing plans for a giant pyramid to house the remains five million dead Londoners, and a scheme to erect a structure in Wembley to dwarf the Eiffel Tower in Paris. Leighton’s hexagonal plan obviously never came to fruition; it is strangely reminiscent of a proposal dating from 1790 by Jacques-Guillaume Thouret to divide France into completely rectangular departments (#159) and of the ideal, geometric city as envisioned by Sir Ebenezer Howard in 1898 (#234). Of the two maps shown here (*), the one the left shows the Metropolitan Parliamentary Boroughs as Constituted Under the Act of 1855, centred on the City, and shown with their subdivisions (St Pancras, for example, is divided in N, S, E and W). The result is a veritable hodgepodge of miniscule fiefdoms. The map on the right presents a more regimented view of London, re-divided in 2-mile hexagon-shaped boroughs, centred around the City in three concentric circles. Six boroughs in the first circle are numbered thus (clockwise from the top):

• 1 Islington, 2 Bethnal Green, 3 Southwark, 4 Kennington, 5 Westminster, 6 St Pancras

Twelve boroughs in the second circle are numbered thus (clockwise from the top):

• 1a Hornsey, 2a Hackney, 3a Old Ford, 4a Poplar, 5a Deptford, 6a Peckham, 7a Brixton, 8a Battersea, 9a Chelsea, 10a Marylebone, 11a St John’s Wood, 12a Kentish Town

Eighteen boroughs, unnumbered, are in the third circle (clockwise from the top):

• Tottenham, Stamford Hill, Leyton Essex, Forest Gate, West Ham, Blackwall, Greenwich, Lewisham, Forest Hill, Norwood, Balham, Wandsworth, Fulham, Kensington, Paddington, Willesden, Hampstead, Highgate,

Many thanks to Simon Austin for sending in this map, found on Kosmograd, a blog animated by an interest in, among other things, utopian architecture, disurbanism, cyberspace. The relevant post starts from this original hexagonal idea to produce a contemporary hexagonal map of London.(*) a bit dark and hazy; any image of better quality is very welcome.

Shared by Johnlumgair The full article is worth a rread.

Based on a similar map of St Petersburg by Vera Evstafieva and Andrew Biliter (here). this one places city-relevant quotes on a San Francisco map, where possible on the district the quote relates to. San Francisco Bay, cable cars, the Mission, the Tenderloin District and Chinatown are all name-checked in this map Many thanks to John McMurtrie of the San Francisco Chronicle for sending in this map, which accompanied an article in the Chronicle in mid-July (online version here on SFGate, the paper’s website).

A - “Now you’re thinking of Europe as Germany and France. I don’t. I think that’s Old Europe. If you look at the entire NATO Europe today, the center of gravity is shifting to the East. And there are a lot of new members. And if you just take the list of all the members of NATO and all of those who have been invited in recently — what is it? Twenty-six, something like that? — you’re right. Germany has been a problem, and France has been a problem (…)” Q - “But opinion polls –” A - “But — just a minute. Just a minute. But you look at vast numbers of other countries in Europe. They’re not with France and Germany on this, they’re with the United States.” That exchange, in 2003, between then US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and (Dutch) TV journalist Charles Groenhuijsen, was about the level of support in Europe for American designs on Iraq. Rumsfeld ruffled the feathers of traditional US allies in Western Europe by suggesting that their opposition to US invasion plans mattered less now the ‘centre of gravity’ in Europe had shifted towards Eastern European states. These states, only recently freed from the Soviet yoke, were more appreciative of US foreign policy than Western European countries, Rumsfeld suggested. There are other definitions of what “Old Europe” is. The time before the French Revolution (1789), when royalty ruled, privileged few profited and the masses were voiceless serfs, has sometimes been called ”Old Europe” (although more commonly defined as the Ancien Regime). Europe is also old demographically - low birthrates combining with long life expectancy to make the average age of Europeans the highest in the world. And Europe is part of the “Old World”, because it was known to the Ancients (this also included parts of Africa and Asia), as opposed to the “New World” (i.e. the American continent, only opened up to European exploration, expansion and exploitation from 1492 onward). “Old Europe” is also the name of this work by artist Justine Smith, composed of the national bank notes of all European countries. The Europe in this map is “old” in that it is composed of bank notes as they existed before the introduction of the single European currency. On January 1, 2002, coins and bank notes in euro replaced the national currencies of most EU member countries at that time. The Eurozone now comprises 15 of Europe’s 27 member states, with three older members actively having opted out (i.e. the UK, Denmark and Sweden) and most of the newer members slated for inclusion (once their economy performs within certain parameters). Here are the present members of the Eurozone, with their former currencies:

• Austria (schilling)
• Belgium (franc)
• Cyprus (pound)
• Finland (markka)
• France (franc)
• Germany (mark)
• Greece (drachma)
• Ireland (pound)
• Italy (lira)
• Luxembourg (franc, pegged 1:1 to the Belgian franc)
• Malta (lira)
• Netherlands (guilder)
• Portugal (escudo)
• Slovenia (tolar - cognate with dollar)
• Spain (peseta)

Slovakia is slated to join on January 1, 2009, thereafter retiring its national currency, the koruna. As with all other Eastern European countries that have joined the EU (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria) was obliged at its accession to adopt the euro. The others will do so when the conditions are met. The euro is also the de facto currency of a number of European countries that are not members of the European Union (a precondition to be de jure part of the Eurozone): the Vatican, Monaco and San Marino (Liechtenstein uses the Swiss franc, by the way), and the former Yugoslav republics of Kosovo and Montenegro. The euro has defied prophecies of monetary doom, becoming a strong and internationally respected currency, steadily gaining on the dollar. It has also eliminated the costly necessity of converting currencies within (most of) the European Union. I don’t know if this is true or if it is euro-propaganda, but to illustrate the negative economic impact of these conversions, it was said that you could take any amount of any currency in the pre-euro EU, convert that amount into each other currency until you were back at the original one, and be left with half the original amount of money - without having traded a single thing. The downside of currency unification is the de-diversification of European money, which used to have very distinct national flavours (metaphorically speaking, of course). Nowadays, bank notes in euro look the same everywhere, as do the euro coins, with the difference that the latter are stamped on one side with a national design by the country they’re minted for. You are hereby cordially invited to identify the national heroes and motifs represented on the notes on this map (and other now obsolete ones you might have fond memories of). This map, sent in by The Fashioniste, is one of a series made with bank notes by artist Justine Smith (another one, inevitably, is Euro Europe, made up of euro notes).