#52: MAKING LONDON MORE CREATIVE. Simon’s Parker’s London Cycle Map is a marvellously creative solution to the problem of mapping and signing the London Cycle Network. His brilliant use of long, straight, parallel, coloured lines to simplify a complex tangle of routes; the clever way in which his route codes are arrayed around the map’s perimeter; his revolutionary-yet-simple proposal to create a Tube-style cycle network – imagination is a wonderful thing!
It is fitting that Parker’s idea came from a place of great creativity, because a London Cycle Map would make the capital a miles more creative place. Anyone who cycles regularly will tell you about the astonishing surge in creativity that pedaling brings. It’s like tuning your mind from static to crystal clear. Instead of having vague and fleeting impressions, against a background of anxiety-inducing fuzz that stops you from latching onto anything meaningful, new ideas come easily and lucidly on a bike.
In contrast, Tubes, buses and traffic jams are places of stress, lethargy and mental fog. By inspiring millions more Londoners onto two wheels, Parker’s London Cycle Map would soon transform the capital in wonderful ways we can only imagine.
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"The inborn creativity of
"The inborn creativity of people is no mean or accidental thing; neglect it or disregard it, and it becomes an inner source of poison. It can destroy you and all your human relationships; on a mass scale, it can - nay, it inevitably will - destroy society.
"Contrariwise, nothing can stop the flowering of a society that manages to give free rein to the creativity of its people - *all* its people. This cannot be ordered and organised from the top. We cannot look to government, but only to ourselves, to bring about such a state of affairs."
E.F. Schumacher