About Alice
Alice is drawn to maps for the same reason other people are drawn to mysteries: every line suggests a story, every blank space raises a question, and the most interesting detail is often sitting just outside the frame.
At The Maps Guide, she writes about Google Maps, Google My Maps, Google Earth, classroom mapping, historical imagery, and the many ways people use maps to explain a place. She has a particular fondness for routes that no longer exist, rivers that changed course, boundaries that make little sense at first glance, and streets whose names remember something the landscape has forgotten.
Alice can happily lose an afternoon comparing an old road atlas with a satellite image, tracing a vanished railway, following the outline of a former coastline, or wondering why a road bends around something that is no longer there. She keeps a notebook of place names, unusual map symbols, possible journeys, and questions that begin with: “Why is it like that?”
Away from the screen, Alice prefers long walks without the most efficient route, second-hand bookshops, small museums, railway stations, local-history essays, crosswords, geography quizzes, and tea beside a paper notebook full of arrows, underlines, and unfinished map ideas.
Her favorite maps are not necessarily the ones with the most detail. They are the ones that make someone stop, look again, and notice something they would otherwise have missed.
Off the map
Away from the guides, Alice keeps a quieter list: old atlases and railway diagrams, historical imagery, long walks and wayfinding signs, local-history books, small museums and second-hand bookshops, crosswords and geography quizzes, and paper notebooks full of routes and questions.
Favorite rabbit holes
- vanished railways
- borders that do not behave
- rivers that changed course
- roads that curve around missing landmarks
- renamed streets and forgotten neighborhoods
- unusual map legends
- towns divided by boundaries
- cities viewed decades apart
- islands that appear differently from one map to another
- the stories behind place names
