Get Lost In A Super Cool New Interactive Map Of Literary London

“London is the grandest and most complicated monster on the face of the earth,” German composer Felix Mendelssohn wrote in 1829.

A new interactive digital map out of University College London highlights Mendelssohn’s links to the city, and those of other famous European writers, artists and intellectuals, by detailing their real or imagined encounters with it.

The map, titled Lost & Found, “encourages us to reflect—critically or playfully—on the role of the city as a place where journeys and languages intersect, where people and cultures meet and are transformed,” reads an introduction to the project.

Click on Hans Christian Andersen’s name, for example, and you get an excerpt from the Danish author’s 1855 autobiography, which recorded his first encounter with England’s capital.

“London, the city of cities! Yes, I felt immediately that it was so, and I learned to know it from day to day afterward,” wrote the author best known for his literary fairy tales. “Here is Paris but with a mightier power. Here is the life of Naples but without its bustle.”

Clicking on Vincent Van Gogh’s name pulls up an excerpt from a 1874 letter the Dutch painter wrote while working in London as a young art dealer. “I have a rich life here, ‘having nothing, yet possessing all things.’ Sometimes I start to believe that I’m gradually beginning to turn into a true cosmopolitan, meaning not a Dutchman, Englishman or Frenchman, but simply a man,” the Dutch Post-Impressionist painter wrote.

The map is searchable by theme, location, language or keywords and currently showcases more than 70 entries written in over 20 languages, reflecting London as a centuries-old hub for creatives.

Other clickable names on the map include Dracula author Bram Stoker; Victor Hugo, who wrote The Hunchback of Notre-Dame and Les Misérables; and Cristina Marconi, a contemporary Italian writer and journalist whose award-winning 2019 debut novel Città irreale (Unreal City) tells the story of a generation of Europeans who made their home in the U.K. capital.

“I have great plans for myself, me. Plans as big as this city,” Marconi writes in the book. “I chose it especially, this rail-track-made mammoth with a belly full of cement, this irrational place to which all that’s human and modern leads, and which is however built like a continuous, infinite declaration of love to nature.”

Members of the University College London community and the European National Institutes for Culture suggested names for the map, which currently focuses primarily on writers. But Lost & Found isn’t static. Its creators invite the public to submit new passages, written by European writers outside of the U.K., that describe encounters with London.

“We would particularly welcome entries written by authors from diverse or otherwise under-represented groups,” reads a message on the submission page. “At present, there is an over-representation of white, male writers that risks reinforcing Europe’s historic and enduring inequalities.”

The interactive map will be on display at University College London through May of next year. Along with the map and exhibit, a new writer-in-residence program will commission a contemporary European writer to produce original work about the grand, complicated monster that is London.

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