How we chose our name - Little Paper Towns
The name behind the maps.​
We have always loved the meanings behind company names, and when it came to ours... of course, we got stuck for weeks. I spoke to a friend of mine, who suggested mind maps and mood boards... hours of snipping and glueing later I had destroyed my collection of National Geographic and Travel magazines as well as scoured local social media accounts for inspiration.
By the end of the task my attention was drawn to maps...
Our worlds are made up of plenty of maps – helping us to navigate to and from a place, around a place, thinking a problem through (mind map), creating a new business plan…
But gone are the days of those beautiful paper maps – ones that filled the whole of the car whilst your partner went around the roundabout 3 times, smaller versions on hotel check-in desks and useful town guides in colourful glossy pocketbooks.
Whilst we are kinder to trees by moving online, we still rely on maps every day of our lives, and never have they been more important than when you move as an immigrant to a new town.
We also love vintage and reminiscing of easier old school ways before all the ads, negative news, pop up boxes - when all we need is easy to access inclusive information and contacts.
Towns are little…we realised all the cities have their own online maps and guides…so how about all us non-city dwellers?
Welcome to the world Little Paper Towns...an easy to use, non bias, equal for all platform and community.
And so the decision was made...​
When we think of adventures and exploring, we are normally in holiday mode…but what about when we do “that thing” and move to a new country and town...
Where is the local play park? How do I get my house painted sustainably? What are the local traditions and festivities and when are they on?
We often find ourselves missing out, or not knowing of someone as we weren’t in the right WhatsApp group of on the right Facebook page.
Some of us who move are looking for a new place to plant our roots, others move from town to town, making our lives one big adventure, but we all still need to live and work (boo!), Little Paper Towns was created to provide that bridge – finding other businesses or connecting with those run by local residents.
Uprooting yourself or your family has so many attached emotions from excitement to pure doom and stress (we are here to make part of that a bit easier)
Some fun facts about maps!​
Map – to represent (an area) on a map; make a map of.
A drawing that gives you a particular type of information about a particular area
Put someone or something on the map -
Bring them to prominence.
Map Out - Plan a route or course of action
Cartographers -
used to add a fake town on purpose to their map, known as Paper Towns. So if a cartographer saw another map with the fake town on, they knew the map was a copy.
The French word cartographie (the science of making maps), from which we get our English word cartography, was created from carte, meaning "map," and -graphie, meaning. "representation by." Around the same time we adopted cartography in the mid-19th century, we also created our word for a mapmaker, cartographer
Not all places really exist – in the past cartographers often made mistakes drawing maps. In 1978 the Mountains of Kong were depicted in a map of Africa, sadly they didn’t actually exist, but remained on maps for decades.
North is not always up! It might be at the top of maps but was not always that way. In the Middle Ages most maps had East at the top, facing towards the Garden of Eden.
Latin – East is “Oriens” – to hold a map the right way you had to “Orient” it so East was on top, hence orientation.
Medieval times – Europe – Mappae Mundi – expensive to create by hand – used by royals and nobles to show their wealth. WWII silk maps sealed into Monopoly games with real money hidden, as well as a working compass in the games pieces – sent to war camps for prisoners to use to escape.
We hope you enjoy using our platform as a resident or business, or both!
If you have any ideas or want to get involved, why not get in touch.
