Cartographical Survey: Atlas of London and the London Region

Summary

This review examines the first installment of the Atlas of London and the London Region, issued in 1968. The atlas presents Greater London through thematic maps covering several spatial extents and scales, from Central and Inner London to most of the South-East Economic Planning Region. Its detachable standard-size sheets are organized into physical and historical background, social conditions, economic activities, and transport. The reviewer commends the geographic coverage, practical format, generally clear legends, and maps using unit dots or proportional and graded symbols, especially those on immigrants. He notes the absence of a map showing London’s principal periods of growth, limited synthesis among related population maps, and occasional boundary ambiguities. His main criticisms concern dense, repetitive colours, extensive reliance on choropleth mapping, and the near-uniform use of octile classes without accompanying diagrams of statistical distributions. He argues that these choices can obscure significant values and encourage misinterpretation. He recommends class breaks based on the actual distribution of data, greater use of dot and proportional-symbol methods, and the inclusion of blank boundary maps for users’ own analyses.