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Play with it. Use it. Share it with someone who misses the place. I would love that.
If you want to know how I made it, that part is members only. A man has to eat, and I ate a lot during this one.
I moved away from London and I miss it. I have been trying to make something about it for a while and nothing ever stuck.
Day one I thought this was a weekend job.
Day three I had 441 drawings of London and every single one was a different city. Different light, different season, different hand. Side by side it was a patchwork quilt. I nearly binned the whole thing.
Day six the fix came at one in the morning. Stop drawing each square on its own. Show it the squares already finished around it and ask it to match them, working outwards from the middle like a snail shell. That was all it took. The city started changing on its own, tall glass in the middle easing into brick terraces further out, and I never had to decide where one ended.
Day nine the Thames was a rainbow. Navy in Chelsea, teal at Greenwich, black round the corner at Rotherhithe.
Day eleven a cemetery in Leytonstone came back as a lake, which is when I accepted I was going to have to look at all 441 of them myself.
Day fourteen it was done. 216 square kilometres of it, Hendon at the top, Ravensbourne at the bottom, and I sat there scrolling around my own city for about an hour.
Then I started clicking on things. The place I used to live. The museum I walked past for two years and never went into. Nothing happened, obviously. A drawing is only a picture. It does not know that this bit is Trafalgar Square and that bit is Peckham.
That got me thinking, and it cost me another few days. So 183 of the buildings got drawn again on their own, one at a time, and I gave each one everything that is known about it.
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