I'm fascinated by the maps people create to show where they've been in a whole year, such as the ones on UrbanTick.

So, for the past week, I've been trying to track where I walk with a GPS logger. Sometimes I forget to turn it on, and sometimes it gets confused about where I've been. I haven't made it work in Linux yet, annoyingly.

I've tried drawing on a map of where I think I've walked as well, as it is neater. I haven't been very far in the past week.

Map of where I think I've walked in the past week )
Trees
On the map, a number of roads existed in South-East London without names.

I wandered the streets of Blackheath, with a crumpled print-out, staring at the names on street signs and trying to decode them as if they were secret messages the roads were passing to me. Estates were full of tangled roads, blending too quickly into other roads, sometimes with different names, but sometimes the same. Other roads just weren't marked at all, not even with outlines on my print-out, and every time I found one of those, I felt like I was discovering somewhere new, as if that road had just sprung into existence as I reached it.

I glanced at boat stencils, advertising a Thames treasure hunt; I passed a graveyard containing the grave of Edmond Halley, who Halley's Comet was named after, as well as the grave of Robert Cocking, 'an early aeronaut who in 1837 fell to his death in a local field when his primitive parachute failed'; I found Celestial Gardens; I found the Queen of Clubs on the ground; I walked past streets that had been adopted and streets that hadn't; I was approached by a cute long-haired guy on a bike and wondered whether I was dreaming, but he was mapping too; I visited Kenya, Nigeria and Grenada; and then there was the most beautiful sunset with pinks and blues and oh, I couldn't stop staring at it.
Leading To..
Stumbling on the edges of the mapped world, I walked purposefully in the middle of roads, craving knowledge of the streets, with a GPS in my hand. Chanting road names like a mantra and scribbling rogue roads onto paper, I attempted to help with the OpenStreetMap project during the weekend of the Southampton Mapping Party.

I found there was plenty to discover, the maps becoming fluid and growing in a way that seemed almost organic, like the world is new again and no-one knows where they are or where they were. Sometimes I was asked if I was lost and I never knew how to answer that.

Sometimes I noticed road names that were damaged - one only had the letter 'D' left on a sign, as if the residents/vandals of that area had renamed the street themselves. Sometimes there were traces of former road names or perhaps just mistakes, and that reminded me of Reports of Certain Events in London by China MiƩville. The story includes reports of sightings of viae ferae (feral streets), such as Varmin Way, that appear for a while in different towns, as if they were just visiting, before they vanish again. Perhaps some of the streets that I noted have disappeared already.

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