Kerry Lee

Kerry Lee (Walthamstow, 4 December 1902 – Hemel Hempstead, February 1988) was a British commercial artist and pictorial cartographer who came to mapmaking by an unlikely route. He studied painting in Paris as a young man but spent much of the 1920s working as an estate agent and draughtsman before establishing himself as a commercial illustrator at Blandford Studio off Baker Street in the mid-1930s. During the Second World War he was attached to Air Intelligence, producing classified cut-away drawings of German Luftwaffe aircraft for MI6. Returning to Blandford Street in 1946, he spent six months on London — Bastion of Liberty, the first of the large pictorial poster maps that would define his career. The Travel Association series — London, Oxford, Cambridge, and Stratford-upon-Avon, all published in 1948 — were distributed through American stores as part of a government campaign to attract US tourists and generate foreign currency in the postwar austerity years. He subsequently produced maps of Birmingham, Liverpool, and other cities, publishing through his own Pictorial Maps Ltd. A committed socialist and CND supporter in private life, he invariably signed his maps with a small self-portrait of himself accompanied by his dog Jim.