To the point: Bermondsey Triangle

I thought it might be nice, going forward, to share the stories behind some of my maps, as well as explain some of the decisions behind colour choices, shapes and location on the paper.

Today, I’m going to discuss the Bermondsey Triangle. One of my favourite outcomes so far.

Bermondsey Triangle - Watercolour - Dec 2021 - Mapping Suprematism

The Bermondsey Triangle was designed, like many of my maps, from the route I walked during a London photography trip. The trip wasn’t exclusively centred in Bermondsey but a bulk of the time was spent there, so that’s where the name derived.

Although this painting was the third I released, it was actually the fourth I had planned and designed. This is significant because, by the time I had come to designing the Bermondsey Triangle, I had established a loose colour scheme for specific aspects of the maps. This piece went against one of them.

The two main features of this map are the grey triangle and the blue rectangle. I decided early on that, on designs where I am mapping a specific route I’ve walked or driven, grey should be the colour for the paths I’ve taken. As such, the triangle abstracts the route I walked; starting north of the river, walking south-east across the Thames at Tower Bridge (black and white rectangles), then back westwards into Southwark before finally crossing the Thames and walking back north. This follows convention, as does painting the river blue.

However, where the convention is changed slightly is with the blue circle. In this map, the blue circle represents Liverpool Street station which, being something I consider infrastructure, should be brown. Blue is typically reserved for water. In this case, I didn’t want to add too many colours into the design and I think the blue circle combines well with the rectangle to help balance the strength of the triangle.

Another interesting feature in this map is the introduction of time. The size of each circle indicates how long was spent at each location. It isn’t accurate to an exact time frame but shows I spent less time at the station (blue circle), longer at the pub (green circle), and a time somewhere between the two at the cafe (yellow circle).