Adam Dant’s Map Of Budge Row
Click on the map to enlarge and learn about Budge Row
It seems almost unimaginable now to envisage the City of London when it was densely populated and packed with thriving small trades, before the residents departed and the financial industry took over to deliver the Square Mile as we know it today. Yet London’s most creative cartographer, Adam Dant’s, new map of Budge Row is a just such an endeavour – by conjuring the multifarious life of one street in the City which no longer exists.
“I chose Budge Row as, like Bucklersbury and Walbrook, it has its roots in the birth of mercantile London, plus it was the site of the worship place of retired Roman soldiers known as the Mithraeum,” Adam admitted to me, “but if you visit it at this moment there is just a huge hole in ground – though I understand the new development plans to reinstate the street diagonally through the building as an indoor shopping causeway.”
Yesterday, Adam & I climbed up onto the roof of Number One Poultry to look down upon the site of the former Budge Row, now engulfed by the City’s largest building site, and wondered at the lost industry and culture of two thousand years in a single thoroughfare. “I think there’s a moment of recognition for Londoners, when they pass by and look into these huge excavations, of their part in a general urban continuum,” said Adam, thinking out loud, as we both peered down into the construction site.
Adam Dant in the City of London with the site of former Budge Row in the background
Budge Row is to be seen in the bottom left corner of this 1720 map of the City
Map copyright © Adam Dant
Bowing to popular demand, Adam Dant has agreed to produce a limited edition of his MAP OF THE COFFEE HOUSES. If you are interested to acquire a copy, email adamdant@googlemail.com
THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR YOUR GREAT SITE , AT 85 YEARS I DO REMEMBER A GREAT DEAL OF YOUR ARTICLES CONTENTS , I WAKE UP DAILY WITH SOMETHING THAT IS TRUE AND INTERESTING , NOT THE USUAL FICTION, I WAS BORN IN MANOR PARK , MY GREAT GRANDFATHER WAS CHIEF RABBI OF BEVIS MARKS SYNAGOGUE , MY FATHER WHO LIVED TO 100 WAS BORN IN KIRBY STREET POPLAR ,WHERE HIS FATHER HAD A BUILDERS BUSINESS, AND RUN A SOUP KITCHEN , I DO HOPE AND LOOK FOREWARD TO MANY MORE OF YOUR ARTICLES RAYMOND BINES.
The question is: are the “new things” always the “better things”? I have my reasonable doubts…
Good to have such an “keeper of ancient treasures” like Mr Adam Dant!
Love & Peace
ACHIM
Lovely pair of bats again Adam . . . definitely the best booted cartographer !!