Sarah Hartley tells the story of Phyllis Pearsall. The daughter of a flamboyant Hungarian Jewish father and an Irish-Italian mother, her bizarre childhood did not stop her from becoming one of Britain's most intriguing entrepreneurs. After a failed marriage, Phyllis supported herself as a portrait painter. It is through trying to find her patrons' houses that she became frustrated at the lack of a decent street map of London and decided to do something about it. During a single year she covered most of London's 23,000 streets, often leaving at dawn to walk for up to 18 hours. To publish the atlas, in 1936, she set up The Geographers' A-Z Map Company - which still publishes the London A-Z, as well as that of every other major British city.

Sarah Hartley is the author of Mrs P's Journey: The Remarkable Story of the Woman Who Created the A-Z Map (Simon & Schuster).

The largest medieval world maps show Palestine in some detail: it lay at or near to the centre of them all. But it occupied no less central a position in contemporary thought and culture, and there are other regional maps of the area, dating from the 13th and 14th centuries like the large world maps. Some are simply based on world maps; others draw their information from contemporary travel accounts of the Holy Land. They all have much to tell us about medieval ideas of the land of the Bible and of the Crusades - and also about the development of medieval mapping.

P.D.A. Harvey, who is currently researching on these maps, is Professor Emeritus of Medieval History at Durham University. He is the author of many, including Medieval Maps (The British Library).

Tickets £5.00 (concessions, £3.50)
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The foundation of the trading port of Gadir (modern Cadiz) by the Phoenicians some time around 800 BC introduced the literate peoples of the Mediterranean to the frightening and barbarous world of the Atlantic. Gadir became the starting point for journeys of exploration both to the north and the south. As news of the ocean shores spread Greek sailors took up the challenge and one of them, Pytheas of Massalia, even circumnavigated Britain in about 320 BC. Along the Atlantic Façade they found technically able communities with traditions of sailing, navigation and time-keeping going back for more than three millennia. Pytheas, in all probability, used local ships to transport him - there are hints that they may have reached Iceland.

Barry Cunliffe is Professor of European Archaeology at Oxford. His books include The Ancient Celts, Facing the Ocean and The Extraordinary Voyage of Pytheas the Greek (Penguin). He has excavated widely in Britain and in France and Spain.

Tickets £5.00 (concessions, £3.50)
To book please ring +44 (0)20 7412 7332, email boxoffice@bl.uk or write to
The British Library Box Office (VS), 96 Euston Road, London NW1 2DB
or come to the Information Desk. Please make cheques payable to 'The British Library'. We also accept payment by Visa and MasterCard. We regret that we are unable to accept debit cards, e.g. Switch or Delta.

The Underground Diagram that first appeared in 1933 endeared itself instantly to the public. Within a year or so it was difficult to imagine what life had been like without it. Its creator's name - H.C. Beck - was to be seen by the keen-eyed in the bottom left-hand corner of the poster version of the Diagram from 1933 to 1959. But no photograph of him was published during those years, nor did Harry Beck seek publicity. The financial rewards for his work were very small. When he was callously deprived of its stewardship in 1960, Ken Garland was in touch with him during the bitter disputes with London Transport. Beck entrusted to him all the documents relating to the Diagram, and Garland was invited by Herbert Spencer, editor of The Penrose Annual, to contribute an article, which became a book, Mr Beck's Underground Map (Capital Transport Publishing).

Ken Garland is a practising graphic designer. He is currently Visiting Professor in Information Design at the Universidad de las Americas, Puebla, Mexico, and Visiting Professor at the University of Brighton.

Tickets £5.00 (concessions, £3.50)
To book please ring +44 (0)20 7412 7332, email boxoffice@bl.uk or write to
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or come to the Information Desk. Please make cheques payable to 'The British Library'. We also accept payment by Visa and MasterCard. We regret that we are unable to accept debit cards, e.g. Switch or Delta.

We are becoming used to visualisations of the planet down to the level of individual buildings from satellite data and to in-car navigation systems and handheld GPS receivers to show us where we are. Just around the corner is L-commerce, which fuses the web and high-speed telecommunications with space technology, Geographical Information Systems, Artificial Intelligence and GPS. In Neal Stephenson's Snowcrash the future is portrayed from a computer games perspective where Virtual Reality becomes our escape pod. The view advanced here is of a world where the computer becomes a portal through which we can view anywhere on the planet in photoreality indistinguishable from what we might see if we go there.

Jan-Peter Muller, Professor of Image Understanding and Remote Sensing in the Department of Geomatic Engineering at University College London, was the Executive Producer of the LANDMAP project to create a 10m database of the British Isles using spaceborne data.

Tickets £5.00 (concessions, £3.50)
To book please ring +44 (0)20 7412 7332, email boxoffice@bl.uk or write to
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or come to the Information Desk. Please make cheques payable to 'The British Library'. We also accept payment by Visa and MasterCard. We regret that we are unable to accept debit cards, e.g. Switch or Delta.

The 'Shrinking Continent' is the story of sailing voyages into the world's most inhospitable seas in search of a mythical southern continent, terra australis incognita, where, according to the best authorities, lived millions of people. This centuries-old idea was torn to shreds by Captain James Cook in the 1770s and finally blown to the four winds by Captain James Clark Ross in the 1840s. Both of these were Royal Navy expeditions. But sandwiched between them came naval expeditions from Russia, France and the USA. Sealing voyages from Britain and North America also added their distinctive style to the exploding of the myth, and the shrinking of an Antarctic coastline that some cartographers thought stretched as far north as the Tropic of Capricorn.

Alan Gurney is a yacht designer, lecturer and author with a particular interest in polar history. The combination of sailing and polar experience has resulted in two books: Below the Convergence and The Race to the White Continent (Norton).

Tickets £5.00 (concessions, £3.50)
To book please ring +44 (0)20 7412 7332, email boxoffice@bl.uk or write to
The British Library Box Office (VS), 96 Euston Road, London NW1 2DB
or come to the Information Desk. Please make cheques payable to 'The British Library'. We also accept payment by Visa and MasterCard. We regret that we are unable to accept debit cards, e.g. Switch or Delta.