Cycle the Underground,overground,wombling free,making a tube map for a poster for me

I did have a play around with Animaps but its the buggiest website ever and repeatedly make my computer crash. I'd have thrown my computer at the wall in frustration if I'd continued with it any longer. If it worked properly it had potenital, but the site seems a work in progress rather than the finished article so I've given up on it.

I went to my local library to look at some road maps to get print outs of my missing roads. I got lucky as they had a jumbo A-Z which covered more than my A5 versions, so I used the photocopier to complete the missing sections of the District Line, Central Line, and the tiny bit of the Piccadilly line around the western end of Heathrow. It also had some of the Metropolitan line, but only as far as Chorleywood. Like me it seems the folks at A-Z HQ consider including Amersham and Chesham a bit of a stretch.

The problem with the jumbo A-Z was the scale was different, my A5 A-Z's has a scale of 4.55cm to 1km, whereas the jumbo one had a scale of 5.26 cm to 1km. Luckily the library had a photocopier that did re-sizing so after some quick sums I was ready for some downsizing. The copier did'nt do fractions of a percent so the rescaling would be out by 0.5%, but thats close enough for my purposes. The section from Chorleywood to Amersham and Chesham was going to be more problematic as none of the library maps had any decent detailed pages of this wilderness area. I'd probably have had better luck getting similar scale maps of Antarctica or the moon. I return home for another session with the scissors. The copies are in black and white as I'll be colouring them in, so the overall amatuerish appearance is maintained.

That evening my mum phoned to say she'd read in one of the Sunday papers about an exhibition in the Museum of London about Phyllis Pearsall, the inventor of the A-Z. I looked it up only to discover is was only on for a few days, and the last day was in fact that day, arse marbles. Oh well, I would have liked to have seen that. Anyway having never even heard of her, I googled for more info and she sounded a right charecter, who led an interesting life, worth looking up.

The story goes she come up with the idea of the A-Z after trying unsuccessfully to find her way to a party using some OS maps. Finding the existing maps wholly unsatisfactory she set about, the very next day is it said, making her own version. She claimed to have walked 3000 miles up every street in London, sometimes up to 18 hours a day. It does'nt say how long it took her, but walking pace is an average of 3mph so thats about 1000 hours, which is bloody epic and puts my efforts to shame. She should have used a bicycle. It also turns out her life has recently been made into a musical, starring Izzie Suttie of Peep Show fame, not that I'll be seeing that as I hate musicals. My googling also revealed she had a blue plaque in her honour, at her place of birth, 3 Court Lane Gardens, East Dulwich. Now phones are smart and everyone has maps at their fingertips the A-Z is not as invaluable as it once was, but I decided to take a pilgrimage up there for a photo. It would have made a good tag on this forums Bicycle Tag thread, but I did'nt know the current one so did'nt bother.

So I decide to try some print outs from google maps to get the roads out to Amersham, so I'm back round the library again. Typically enough none of the google maps 'zooms' are the same scale as the A-Z, so I do some printing and am again resizing on the photocopier. I finally have the right scale but the roads are very different in size to the A-Z, so its back home where I paint the over the roads in white, making them the same width as the A-Z version. Bloody hell this whole thing is much more of a faff than I'd hoped. I then cut up some more cardboard for the new roads and gaffer tape then onto my existing map. The results are pretty shoddy but an improvement, and I finally have a full map at 1:22,000 scale . It is a shade over 3 metres wide and nearly 2 metres high. Its now like the story of the bloke who rebuilt his car in his living room and then realised he can't get it out of the house. The flats got stairs that double back on themselves so the map is to big for me to take outside to photograph in the sun. My eyes almost bled lining that bastard up, so that's not a job I'm volunteering for again in a hurry.

The next day I decided to go to Stuart R Stevenson on Clerkenwell Road, to see if they had any acetate and some permanent markers so I could trace the lines as Rhowe suggested. Not being an arty type this of shop is totally off my normal radar, and what a proper Aladdins cave it is, much more than a grown ups colouring in shop. I confessed my artisitic ignorance as soon as I walked in the door, and the two guys there could not have been more helpful. I told them what I was doing, they steered me away from the expensive roles of acetate (£180 for a 10m roll! Who knew clear plastic could be so expensive). The guy behind the counter then got out his A-Z and we must have spent 15 minutes testing a huge range of pens on the cheaper acetate to get good colour matches for each line, so a massive thanks to them.

It was then back home to start the epic tracing.

Some of the pens are a bit wishy washy looking, so for the Jubilee and the DLR I have to outline them in dotted black lines to make them stand out a bit more, and the overground I decide to do in a solid orange line. This takes a couple of days. I have'nt been able to write on all the stations, the bit in central London is just too congested. This really brings it home much of a masterpiece Harry Becks design is, his whole maps fits on the back page of my A5 A-Z. and I can't fit all the station names on a map 3 metres across! There are one or two slight station name changes, Wimbledon becomes Wombledon, as a Spurs supporter Arsenal is shortened to Arse and I can't resist calling Lewisham, Lewishambles. I also trace in the river Thames in a clear blue that makes it look like a lagoon in the Caribbean, I did say I was going to take artistic licence with that.

I then take it off the A-Z cut out and temporarily blutac it on the livig room wall so I can get a good look at it on a white background. The cheap acetate is only marginally thicker and stronger than clingfilm so I'm terrified of tearing it after all the effort so far, and I spent nearly an hour trying to get the tiny sodding creases out but don't manage it completely. At a later date when I can afford it I will try and get a big single sheet of acetate so it looks better. It still looks good and I'm pretty pleased with it, though as usual my crap compact camera does'nt do it justice. I plan to finish it off by having a header along the top with the London Overground, Underground and DLR roundels and add a simple matchstick drawn bicycle to illustrate I've ridden it. My brother has a decent SLR so I'm going to borrow that to try and take some better pictures.

I then head off to WH Smith to get some white stickers to add to the map for the stations that have connections to other lines. Incidentally WH Smith were the first company to take Phyllis' A-Z, setting her on the road the fame and fortune. True to recent form they don't have any small white stickers, only coloured ones.

So its back home to paint them white, before drawing black bicycle wheels over the white. I can't find anything small enough to draw round so in keeping with the sketchyness so far I do it freehand. I can't build real wheels and its clear I can't draw them either.

Once on they're unlikely to come off without trashing the map so I'm putting this on hold for now until I'm sure I'm going to use them. I still have'nt started painting over the orange and yellow roads on the big A-Z map to make the coloured lines stand out more so that's another big task.

As part of a longer term project I hatched on the idea for a short film clip. I thought maybe a crimewatch type reconstruction, where I can move a tiny bicycle along the big A-Z map, like some WW1 General moving battalions around a massive map. I need a small model bicycle, The problem is I need a really small one, the size that would be considered too easily swallowed by a young child, therefore finding a toy one in the correct size would be unlikely. Praise be for the interwebs as I then stumbled across a tiny Hornby model bicycle to allow train nerds to achieve the complete village scene in their girl free attics or sheds. After calling 9 different Hornby stockists in London with no luck, I was beginning to feel like J.R Hartley trying to locate his version of Fly Fishing. l finally struck gold, in who'd have thought it, a train model shop run by a woman, Jane's Trains in Tooting. They agreed to hold it for me as I raced down there, and secured my first bike purchase in years. A pack of two red bicycles, complete with flat bars and front basket, obviously part of the the Hornby hipster range.

The bars and basket I could live with, but my main gripe was they were'nt blue. So, yes, its back home and out with the white paint again as undercoat, I dont have any blue paint so its felt tips to get acceptable blue livery for this most minute of steeds. As the wheelbase was only 2cm this involved brain surgeon levels of fiddlyness, but I'm happier now. I did'nt fancy my chances of finding any atom sized Mercian decals so settled for plain blue.

On the teacake theme I realise I've come this far without even going into the specifics of teacake eating, which is long overdue. As far as I'm aware there are 3 main methods of eating them, which psychologists can probably map a complete personality profile from. 1. There is the wolf it down in one approach. I don't so this, I'm not a complete savage. 2. Prise the top mallow and chocolate bit off with your teeth, then have the biscuit base afterwards, ideally with a swig of tea (this is my preferred method) and 3. The nibble the chocolate coating off in meticulous fashion, taking care not to remove the mallow, which is eaten second, and finishing off with the base. Far too time consuming and OCD I say. Ahem sorry, that bit of housekeeping is now out of the way.

I plan to attach my tiny bicycle to an unravelled metal clothes hanger to complete my first prop. I need some more props and need to build a botched jig for my battered old gopro to film it, then come up with some of script or commentary. I'm off to Wales again this week for a stag do and visiting friends and family, so this is all being put on ice for now, back soon.