You are here: a history of the estate map signboard
Signboard for the Bonamy-Delaford Development 1964. designed by F. O. Hayes, et al for Camberwell MBC (demolished 1996)
Credit: Miles Glendinning/ The Tower Block UK Archive
A talk by Julian Williams RIBA
19.00-21.00 on 16th September 2025
at the Alan Baxter Associates Gallery, 77 Cowcross St, London EC1M 6EL and online.
Docomomo members go free. To book a member’s ticket please see here. To become a member see here.
Tickets for attendance in person and online are available here. Tickets will also be available on the door for £15.
For online attendance, please book your ticket before 18.00 on the day of the event. A link to watch the talk online will be sent to attendees before it begins.
Take a walk in any city or town in the UK and you’re likely to come across a map, not on a phone or screen, but on a metal or timber signboard. ‘You are here’, it might say, laying out a territory in a familiar, yet somewhat unreadable graphic style of coloured lines and blocks. A logo in the corner will remind you of its owner- the local authority or perhaps another social housing provider. Follow the map and discover an estate- a neighbourhood whose name is lost to the world of the digital map, and where concepts of belonging extend beyond definitions of legal property.
This talk is about housing estates’ intertwined relationship with the map, tracing a history from the celebrated landed estate maps and the municipalisation of estate land for social housing in the late nineteenth century to the creation of estates as idealised landscapes of betterment post WWII.
Julian Williams RIBA
Director of Teaching, Learning and Quality, School of Architecture and Cities, University of Westminster
Julian Williams is an architect and lecturer at the School of Architecture and Cities, University of Westminster. He is currently the Director of Teaching, Learning and Quality for the School and teaches design and professional practice.
His research is focused on the historical geography of the housing estate, examining the role of maps in demarcating territory. His current projects include the tradition of estate tours made by visiting politicians and dignitaries, the estate signboard, and the study of ‘belonging on’.