The Boroughs of London

Awarded History Book of the Year 2025 by London Historians - 'A complete joy.' Awarded HIGHLY COMMENDED at the British Book Design and Production Awards 2026. A stylish collection of beautifully designed maps of each individual London borough, paired with quirky and fascinating facts about what you'll find there. Cartographer and illustrator Mike Hall is renowned for his retro-themed print collection of boldly coloured, highly detailed maps of every London borough, inspired by classic 1960s graphic design. Published to coincide with the 60th anniversary of the boroughs' establishment, The Boroughs of London brings together all of Mike's London maps in one elegant volume to pore over. But that's not all: alongside the maps is a wealth of authoritative but chatty commentary on each borough from Matt Brown, author of many Batsford books and acknowledged London expert. Packed with interesting facts, anecdotes and trivia, the book provides an introduction to each borough and its constituent neighbourhoods, as well as coverage of ten key places of interest per borough, including historic buildings, monuments, squares, parks and street markets, accompanied by quirky illustrations. It all adds up to a fascinating snapshot of the borough's rich history and present-day diversity and culture. From well-known, much-visited central London boroughs like Westminster and the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea to less famous, further-flung suburban areas such as Bexley and Hillingdon, this book provides endless revelations about one of the greatest cities of the world, borough by borough. It's the perfect book for London-dwellers, London visitors and London obsessives, history fans, cartophiles and graphic design aficionados. Readers will want to visit every borough!

Mike Hall is an illustrator and obsessive mapmaker from Harlow, UK. A graduate of the University of Westminster, he has created artwork for a broad range of clients in the UK and around the world, including Butlin's, Harper's Magazine, Penguin Books and the Royal Horticultural Society. He has lived in the London Boroughs of Brent, Harrow, Islington and Lewisham, and is now based in Valencia, Spain. Matt Brown is author of several books for Batsford, including Atlas of Imagined Places. He has served as editor and editor-at-large of Londonist.com, writing on topics as diverse as street art, politics, map-making and science. With a deep love of trivia, he's written and hosted hundreds of quizzes, including events for the Museum of London and Manchester Science Museum, among many others. He lives in Hertfordshire and tweets at @mattfromlondon.

Introduction A History of Local Government in London The Boroughs Compared The Boroughs of London Future Boroughs Index