Phyllis Pearsall

(1906 - 1996)

It’s as famous as the London underground, red buses and black cabs and without it people would never be able to find their way around the capital.

The humble A-Z street atlas is the book we reach for when we want to know exactly where to find Wigmore Street, Langham Place or Theobald’s Road. You’ll find it on the bookshelves of most London homes, in car glove boxes and just about every newsagents in the city. It seems such a simple idea that we have come to take it for granted.

Now’s you chance to honour the brilliance of the Dulwich-born woman who came up with the idea and walked 3,000 miles to make it happen. Phyllis Pearsall.

She was born in 1906 and spent the first few years of her bizarre and often traumatic childhood in Court Gardens Lane.

By the time she was 15, her father was bankrupt and had abandoned his family. Her mother and step father had turned her out on the streets and she’d moved to France to live the Bohemian life with her artist brother.

The idea that changed her life came to her a few days after her 29th birthday after she returned to London and became lost trying to find the homes of people whose portraits she had been commissioned to paint.

Within days, she had taken to the streets - all 23,000 of them - determined to sketch, index and publish them. Despite skepticism and ridicule, the A-Z was on the bookshelves of WH Smith in 1936.

Today, the company publishes over 250 titles ranging from street maps and atlases to large scale plans of towns and cities.