Pete Brooker about his new London Bond Map

Peter Brooker of There Will Be Bond (co-author of From Tailors With Love) has just unveiled his latest project London Bond Map.

Pete Brooker near Hammersmith Bridge (a No Time To Die location where Bond meets M) with his brand new London Bond Map

The map started as an online blog chronicling Pete's movements around the various James Bond locations from the films, novels and even Ian Fleming's personal life. Now Pete has released it as physical media, and I grabbed a quick word with him to talk about the process.

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Pete why did you release a physical map of Bond locations in London? 

When Bond fans would come to London, I would invariably get asked if I knew Ajay Chowdhury and would Ajay have time to show them around London and see all the Bond locations. And then I thought, what if Ajay was busy? I mean he's a busy man. So I embarked on putting something together to help not only Bond fans on their sojourn to London, but go someway in filling that Ajay-shaped void. Plus, I asked Martijn Mulder and Simon Firth if they were working on anything London Location based and they both said no. 

Are all the locations on there? 

No it would have been too much of a task. AND it would overwhelm people to try and squeeze all that information onto an A2 piece of quality bond paper. I've cherry picked the popular ones from the films, and also included some literary locations, and some lifestyle locations that I deem crucial for Bond fans to visit. Lock & Co for example is not only James Bond's hatmaker, but the store is beautiful, and a landmark in itself as it's the oldest shop in London. 

How do you vet which locations go on there?

I mainly think about what would people want to see if they only had a long weekend in London. I'm also mindful that they may have a family in tow, and it would feel a little cruel to send them all the way out to Brent's Cross to see a multi-storey car park. It was tough, because you could quite easily do a map of just the brands for example. But if you look at all the Bond London locations as a whole, the majority are in and around Mayfair, and Central London. This caused quite a congestion of pins, so we had to zoom in to those areas so it didn't look like a bullseye on a dartboard.

Is there a place where someone could go to get all the Bond locations in London?

Well there is of course the brilliant book James Bond's London by Gary Giblin, but that only goes up to TWINE I believe. And we have so many more from Craig's era and the lifestyle element of Bond has exploded from then also. There are also other great blogs, and I'm in the throes of creating an online version of the Bond London locations as a resource. 

And the map is priced at £10.07? Did you feel good about coming up with that?

Yes well I hate anything priced a penny under, and I thought £9.95 would cut too much into our bottom line. And yes, I laughed to myself. Which I always do at my own jokes.

I'm sorry the map is priced extortionately for international tracking, but that's just what Royal Mail charge I'm afraid.

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The London Bond Map is available to buy now, domestically and internationally.