Review - Phillip's Road Map of Paris

In terms of sheer enjoyment and entertainment, there’s not much to beat a map. And that’s before you’ve even got into the practical aspects of them.

Even before you’ve arrived at your destination, maps are useful. You get them out on tables and immediately begin to decorate them with little pencil marks and rings from coffee cups, tea cups or glasses of red wine, depending on your lifestyle.

Seeing an area laid out before you, neatly organised and made sense of, gives you a tremendous feeling of capability. Whether you will be able to reproduce this sensation of a total geographical grasp of things under live conditions is another question. A map on a table is one thing, a map held up on a windy street corner at the mercy of the elements and a wind so vicious that the local name for it is ‘sir’ is quite something else.

But like getting foreign currency, inoculations and guide books, a map is an essential for preparing for any journey, foreign or domestic. One thing I did learn through experience though was that if you are walking or cycling, it’s always advisable to go for a map showing how hilly the area is. A contour line can make a big difference to a cycle ride.

Or, if you fancy yourself as the next Emperor of the Known World, you can draw on them, dividing up Europe among your cronies based on who laughs most sycophantically at your jokes, and sending a message by making some out-of-favour cousin, who you have to acknowledge because of, you know, the whole family thing, somewhere like Naples, for a laugh. All it takes is a big pencil, a cigar, a large room and a huge private army.

More than that, maps have a use that goes beyond their primary purpose. How many times have you seen, framed on some wall somewhere, a map of an area as it used to be. Map as decoration proves that as well as being useful maps can be artistically pleasing. A framed map on the wall of a house means one of two things, that the owner appreciates maps as decoration as well as tools, or that he has developed a time machine and is planning a jaunt to 16th century Shropshire at the weekend.

I don’t think that in the future we’ll see hand-held GPS gadgets framed in pubs.

Maps of the countryside are great fun, not just because there’s always something in the key that refers to something outrageously rural, like duck pond or area of unusually high EU subsidy, but because it’s always amusing to try and spot villages with vaguely rude names.

Where the skill and art of the map combine though, is a city map. If you’re in a city and you’re consulting your map, it’s a pretty good bet that you don’t know quite where you are. This is a problem because, despite cities usually having a landmark around every corner, city streets tend to look the same after a while.

Paris is a very good example of this. You’d think that with the Eiffel Tower in residence, you’d be able to get a bearing off it and basically this would obviate the need for a map. Not so. The Eiffel Tower is, apparently, the world’s only stealth construction. For a huge bloody great mass of steel, it is remarkably adroit at concealing itself below rooflines or out of sight round corners. In short, you need a map.

And mine is the Philip’s road map of Paris Streets. This edition may be a decade old, but the great thing about Paris is they are a bit leery of redevelopment.

Clear mapping with good use of colour, a sensible font and printed on robust quality paper, this map was folded, unfolded and folded back many times during my last visit. It lives in a bag or back pocket and it never took me long to find out where I was. It also has a very easy to understand metro map.

It may never end up framed in a pub, but it would not be out of place in a café on the South Bank.