On y va!
Whether you’re celebrating Bastille Day with a hike or cycling your own version of the Tour de France, our Map of the Month for July, the France IGN Greenways and Cycle Routes Map will help you plan your route.
Our Book of the Month for July 2022 is Atlas of Vanishing Places: The Lost Worlds as They Were and as They Are Today by Travis Elborough.
Atlas of Vanishing Places won the 2020 Edward Stanford Travel Writing Award for Illustrated Travel Book of the Year. Now it is out in paperback so is lightweight and perfect to pack for holidays.
Have you ever wondered about cities that lie forgotten under the dust of newly settled land? Rivers and seas whose changing shape has shifted the landscape around them? Or, even, places that have seemingly vanished, without a trace?
Continue reading Book of the Month: Atlas of Vanishing PlacesTo celebrate the paperback launch of the 2020 Edward Stanford Travel Writing Award winning Atlas of Vanishing Places by Travis Elborough, here is an extract for you all to read:
Continue reading Extract: Atlas of Vanishing Places by Travis ElboroughIn West Winds: Recipes, History and Tales from Jamaica , award-winning food writer Riaz Phillips tells countless tales of Jamaica through its dishes, drawing on his memories of growing up in the Caribbean diaspora of London and time living in Jamaica.
With a mix of location and recipe photography by Phillips, West Winds fully immerses readers in the spirit and food of Jamaica. From the “waste not, want not” approach instilled in Riaz by his grandmother, to the Ital food he was introduced to living with the Rastafari community, working at eco-farms as well as reconnecting to his grandfather’s birthplace of downtown Kingston, the 100 plus mouthwatering meals, hearty soups, bakes, and refreshing drinks cover all the different elements of Jamaican cooking.
Recipes rooted in centuries of culture through folktales and anecdotes make West Winds so much more than a cookbook – it is an ode to Jamaica and the diasporas, the people and their heritage, with something for everyone. Here is an extract:
Rice and peas recipe from West Winds: Recipes, History and Tales from Jamaica by Riaz Phillips. Published by DK £25
Nomads by Anthony Sattin tells the ground-breaking story of Nomadic peoples on the move across history.
Humans have been on the move for most of history. Even after the great urban advancement lured people into the great cities of Uruk, Babylon, Rome and Chang’an, most of us continued to live lightly on the move and outside the pages of history. But recent discoveries have revealed another story . . .
Reconnecting with our deepest mythology, our unrecorded antiquity and our natural environment, Nomads is the untold history of civilisation, told through its outsiders.
Here is an extract from Nomads by Anthony Sattin
A young man walks towards me with a stick slung across his shoulders and a flock at his feet. The sheep, in front, beside and behind him, are as chaotic as meltwater in the nearby stream and they carry him down the path like a crowd of rowdy children. An older man follows, weatherworn but still strong, a rifle over his left shoulder. He clicks his tongue to encourage them forward. Behind him are two women on donkeys, one older than the other, and I guess they are his wife and daughter. They look strong women, but then it is a tough life beneath the shard peaks of the Zagros Mountains. Other donkeys carry their belongings, bundled inside heavy rust-and-brown cloth that the women have woven and will soon repurpose as door- flaps when the tents are set up.
Continue reading An extract from Nomads by Anthony SattinOur Map of the Month for June 2022 is the Earth Wall Map by CartDeco.
This map has been five years in the making, going through many iterations and checks to make this one of the finest map of our planet on the market. The details have been meticulously checked with an emphasis on including indigenous place names where appropriate, in particular in Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
Continue reading Map of the Month: CartDeco Earth MapOur Children’s Book of the Month for June 2022 is Martha Maps It Out by Leigh Hodgkinson.
Martha LOVES drawing maps. She creates maps of everything-even her thoughts and dreams! Let Martha be your guide as she welcomes you to her world. Starting in outer space, we zoom in page by page, to our planet, Martha’s community, and beyond to her dreams of a future where ANYTHING is possible. Full of quirky details and fun non-fiction labels that children will love poring over-they will discover cool new facts with every reading. Each map is imbued with an irresistible sense of excitement about the world and optimism for the future.
Our Book of the Month for June 2022 is Where the Wildflowers Grow: My Journey Through Botanical Britain by Leif Bersweden.
‘When was the last time you stopped and noticed a wild plant?’
An intriguing and timely exploration of the importance of Britain and Ireland’s plant life.
Leif Bersweden has always been fascinated by plants. From a young age, his afternoons were spent hunting for and cataloguing the plants in his local area. But it is a landscape that is fast disappearing.
Since the end of the Second World War, 97% of Britain’s wildflower meadows have disappeared. Climate change, habitat destruction and a declining pollinator population mean that the future for plant life looks bleaker than ever before. Many of us are also unable to identify, or even notice, the plants that grow around us.
At the Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards in March we awarded Hilary Bradt with the Outstanding Contribution to Travel Writing Award. The previous year’s recipient of this award, Dervla Murphy, sent this message to Hilary from her home in Ireland for us to read out at the awards;
“When we first met in an Andean hut in 1979 I had one of those instant reactions- a kindred spirit. During the subsequent decades Hilary, as both a traveller and writer, has provided invaluable guidance and encouragement to generations of young travellers uninterested in beaten tracks. Congratulations of your award Hilary.”
Here Hilary Bradt pays tribute to a great travel writer and a special friend for 40 years.
-by Hilary Bradt
On May 5 I received an email from Dervla’s friend and PR, Steph Allen, with this message: “I’ve just spoken to Dervla who is not at all well. She has heart failure and believes that she is (in her own words) on her way out. I asked if there was anyone she’d like me to let know and she asked if I could send you a message to say thank you for everything you have done for her over the years”. This unwarranted thoughtfulness and generosity personifies this extraordinary woman who died on May 22, and who I first met in 1979 in an Ecuadorian hostal (the sort with no hot water, $3 a night, with rooms clustered around a courtyard). She was returning from Peru, which would (eventually) result in Eight Feet in the Andes and George and I were researching our guide to Backpacking in Venezuela, Colombia and Ecuador – the third in our fledgling backpacking series. I, like so many other young travellers, had been inspired by Dervla’s early books, in my case Full Tilt and In Ethiopia with a Mule, and was awe-struck to meet such a famous writer. The awe was diluted by a shared bottle of local rum, but the admiration grew steadily throughout our 44-year friendship.
Continue reading Remembering Dervla Murphy-by Megan Barford, Curator of Cartography at Royal Museums Greenwich and author of A is for Atlas: Wonders of Maps and Mapping.
As a map curator, I often get asked about my favourite map and it’s terribly difficult to choose. In the collection of Royal Museums Greenwich there are near-pristine sixteenth-century maps illuminated with gold and maps reduced to scraps through use at sea. There are maps that show the involvement of women in the book and print trades in eighteenth-century London, alongside maps that came out of trade union activity during the Second World War. Luckily, in my new book, A is for Atlas, I’ve been able to pick 104 favourites, organised according to alphabetical themes in a treasury of stories about map making and use, and about materials and techniques, from the thirteenth century to the present day. Here, D is for display, E is for Engraving, F is for Fake. Together the themes help us to interrogate maps and mapping in different ways, and understand the rich human stories that can be found throughout the collection of Royal Museums Greenwich.
Continue reading A is for Atlas by Megan Barford
