Phyllis Pearsall 1906-1996

Another hero of London and its infrastructure and another all but forgotten name. Phyllis Pearsall is commemorated by a London Borough of Southwark plaque at 3 Court Lane Gardens in leafy Dulwich where she was brought up as the daughter of Alexander Gross a Hungarian Jewish immigrant and Isabella Crowley, an Irish-Italian Roman Catholic suffragette. Her parents relationship was troubled and they went their separate ways. Phyllis was educated at the private Roedean school until her fathers business went bust. She then led a restless life marrying, and later leaving Richard Pearsall, an friend of her brother and working as a tutor and as a shop assistant in France before returning to London. She worked as a portrait painter before, as the story goes she failed to find her way to a party in Belgravia so decided to make a completely new map of London. This she apparently did by getting up at 5am each morning and walking every one of London’s 23,000 streets, not going to bed until she had finished an 18 hour day. The result was the A-Z, the first street atlas of London a publication so ubiquitous that it was used in the BBC series as the one book that every Londoner has a copy of and which could be used as the key to a cypher. The truth however is rather more vexed. The head of maps at the British Museum for one believes that Pearsall's reputation was self-perpetuated myth-making. He asserts that Pearsall’s father had been a map-maker and produced map books of London that were almost identical to the A-Z. He believes that Pearsall simply updated these maps to include the newly built areas of outer London, probably by simply calling on the planning department of various local councils street maps and calling the result the ‘A-Z’. This may explain why English Heritage declined to award Pearsall a blue plaque. It should be said that while Barber's assertions may be correct English Heritage are (slowly) attempting to address the unbalance between male and female plaque recipients shining a little more light on female contributions to British society.