Reimagining a City of Women London: An Interactive Map
By Montaz Marche, from the Bartlett Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA).
In renaming approximately 274 stations with the names of famous women, women’s organisations and non-binary people, the City of Women London map dared to create a counter-history that celebrated women/non-binary histories and rectified gendered erasures in London’s history. For the people included or involved in the map and me, it was undoubtedly a great privilege to be a part of. Yet the heart of this project is its desire for inclusivity, reflection, and representation. City of Women London embodies the responsibility we have as a society and city to create an enlightened future of writing inclusive histories, taking the telling of history into our own hands.
City of Women London was originally derived from the City of Women project by Rebecca Solnit and Joshua Jelly-Schapiro, which, renamed the stations of the New York Subway map with famous women of the city. The original City of Women map was not the first to undertake this reimagining, with the original project being inspired by reimagined maps such as Simon Patterson’s ‘The Great Bear’ (1992), Lubaina Himid’s Moments and Connections (2011) and Thick/er Black Lines ‘We Apologise for the Delay to Your Journey’ (2017) to reinsert narratives into popular consciousness.
The map celebrates women, non-binary people, and organisations, ultimately chosen by Rebecca Solnit, Reni Eddo-Lodge and Emma Watson, but aided by the UCL team, including Dr Leah Lovett, Dr Duncan Hay and myself, and the advisory team (made up of historians, writers, activists and more). The role of the team at UCL was the creation of the interactive map, researching each featured individual and generating a visual resource of the City of Women London printed map that continues to emphasise the inclusivity and various intersections of London’s community of women and non-binary people.
City of Women London represents figures from various communities, industries, minorities, and backgrounds who have all impacted and shaped our city. With their full agreement, we included several non-binary people on the map, recognising the resonance between their lives and undertakings and the anti-patriarchal spirit of the project. We also established geographic connections between the featured women on the map and the stations. This emphasis challenges our perceptions of London, its halls of governance, culture, history, science, and technology as a space exclusively of white cisgender men. St Paul’s, for example, and the Old Bailey, the site of British law bestowed by male judges, features Rose Heilbron, the first woman to sit as a judge at the Old Bailey in 1973. Similarly, the map shows how women have held a place in Parliament since 1918 due to Constance Marcievicz, the first female MP (featured at Westminster).
On the printed map, we also highlighted the lesser-known connections between women and famous landmark stations, for example, the Women’s Printing Society at Holborn, cabaret singer Evelyn Dove at Oxford Circus or Native American princess, Pocahontas at Blackfriars. We aimed to reset the narrative of popular women’s movements, highlighting underrepresented women such as Suffragettes Sophia Duleep Singh and Rosa May Billinghurst. Ultimately, by illuminating histories that had already changed London but been seriously underrepresented, we stimulate a reimagination of London.
Each featured individual is a person held in high regard. Still, we wanted to emphasise their humanity and that each person was capable of fault, fragility, triumph, and power in equal measure. We endeavoured, as a project, to look past the narratives of perfectionism given to highly regarded individuals and celebrate each person’s life as sentient beings, conveying their character/personality alongside their achievements. For many women of past and present, their stories are plagued with triggering experiences, such as sexual, domestic, physical emotional abuses, institutionalisation, suicide, and misogyny, that impacted their lives but also became the drive behind their achievements. We strived to show the balances and imbalances in each woman’s life as a central but not defining element of their story. Notable examples include Virginia Woolf at Warren Street, who suffered abuse from her father and brother but went on to become one of the most innovative writers of the 20th century. Similarly, we have Meena Kandasamy at Leytonstone, who reconstructed her experiences of domestic abuse in her first marriage into an international bestseller, shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2018.
We took the responsibility of how these challenging histories were portrayed seriously, eager to disregard misogynistic narratives of inferiority, weakness or hysteria attached to women’s biographies. Our processes involved close collaboration between the UCL research and the PR team and the advisory team. We would take time to meet and process together any triggering material to ensure a safe, open, and healthy working environment. We reflected critically upon the language we used, ensuring that we were sensitive about the lives and histories that we beheld. We had a responsibility of care for each featured person, to ensure that each biography represented how the individual triumphed and achieved despite or in the face of challenges, even if, for a few, the challenges would become overwhelming. We included elements of the personal and professional to present as full a story as we could create and ensure that for every individual/organisation we could, their words (either a quote or reference) were included.
For those women still living and included on the map, their story was not only still being written but they could and should define how the history of their life is told, even if it meant the balance of focus in their biographies became decidedly uneven. This was a difficult line to navigate, as control of the narrative shifted from us, the researchers and writers, to them. But it was a shift that we encouraged, particularly after reading so many stories of those included in this map who did not have the power to define how history remembered them. The latter stages of this project became even more collaborative than we had ever imagined, conversing through hundreds of emails and phone calls, with each of the women to determine if and how they wanted to be celebrated.
Through this ‘editing’, we witnessed first-hand the practice of creating one’s history, a process that for hundreds of years women were not privy to. For some who desired a strict line between public life and private life, careers were emphasised in the place of personal detail. For others, their lives were an open book and if anything were too open for us to facilitate everything that they wanted to include. For the rare few, there were difficult moments in their lives that were completely off-limits; details which in other circumstances, particularly for some of the featured women who had died, we would have included because we welcomed the image of real people who make mistakes, suffer challenges, and rise from them. But each living woman’s wish was not discouraged. We wanted to emphasise that this was their biography. They can define their story as they saw themselves, a reclamation of the liberty afforded to ‘great and powerful men’ by the paradigms of systems that favoured their voice, position, and gender.
Chosen by three incredible women, the City of Women London is a challenge to the gender biases of history. It is a testament to the reclamation of women and non-binary people’s voice and agency, and how we have the power to tell our histories of struggle, trauma, and greatness with a lens of empathy, empowerment, and strength, rather than weakness and inferiority. It is what we are and should be striving for as a society; a history, city and world that recognises the contributions of every citizen regardless of gender, race, age, religion, culture etc. The map is truly a celebration of the past and present but also a statement of the future.
City of Women London was made in partnership with TFL, The Women of the World Foundation and Haymarket Books. Copies of the printed map can be found at https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1661-city-of-women-london-tube-wall-map-a2-16-5-x-23-4-inches.
The interactive map made by the UCL team can be found at https://www.cityofwomenlondon.org/
