The Poetry of Places

Places of Poetry is a creative arts project which wants to inspire the English and Welsh to write poetry about the places that inspire them. The project hopes that budding poets will pin their poems about English and Welsh locations directly to the Places of Poetry interactive map.

Users can add poems to the map from now until the 4th October 2019. After that date new poems will not be able to be added. The map, however, will still be available for those who wish to read all the poems added during the project. Poems can be submitted in English and Welsh. All poems will be reviewed before being added to the map in order to ensure that no offensive or plagiarized work is published.


As a cartographer what most attracts me about the Places of Poetry project isn't so much the poetry but the map itself. The background map used for Places of Poetry is inspired by William Hole's engraved maps created for Michael Drayton epic poem Poly-Olbion (1612). The Places of Poetry map is an original work but is heavily inspired by Hole's highly decorative and iconographic style.

The Place of Poetry map includes new icons celebrating some of the UK's most well known heritage sites. These include Stonehenge, Ely Cathedral and even the Oval cricket ground. Other icons on the map (for example for forests and farming regions) are more direct copies of Hole's iconography. The marine icons of Neptune, sirens and ships are also direct copies from William Hole's engraved maps.


Fans of poetry may also be inspired by the Poetry Atlas, an interactive map of poems written about locations around the globe.