Paper Trails: Turning Bus Tickets and Coffee Slips into a Map of Your Camden Street

There is a particular kind of paper that piles up in Camden pockets. The 73 bus ticket. The coffee receipt from a place whose name has half rubbed off. A flyer for a gig you meant to go to. A cardboard sleeve from a pastry. Most of it goes in the bin without a second thought. But those scraps are also a record of movement, appetite and neighbourhood life. This project turns them into a collage map of your own street — no expensive art supplies, no prior drawing skills, just a bit of patience and a good glue stick.

What you'll need (and what you absolutely don't)

The beauty of this project is that it asks you to spend almost nothing. You probably already own half of it.

• A base: an A3 or A2 sheet of thick card, or the side of an old cardboard box. Free cardboard is perfect.
• Glue: a glue stick for paper, plus PVA or a watered-down PVA mix for sealing at the end.
• Scissors and a pencil.
• A week's worth of paper scraps: bus tickets, receipts, flyers, packaging, envelopes, stamps, old magazines, food wrappers that are clean and dry.
• Optional: a local map printout for reference, a black marker, a ruler, a paintbrush for the sealant.

You do not need a cutting mat, a lino tool, fancy papers, a printer or a designated studio. A kitchen table and twenty minutes at a time will do.

Step one: choose your patch

Don't try to map all of Camden. Pick one street, one estate, one short walk. Maybe it's the stretch between Kentish Town Library and the launderette. Maybe it's the loop from your front door to the bus stop and back. Maybe it's Queen's Crescent market on a Saturday. The smaller the patch, the richer the map.

Walk it once with a notebook or your phone. Note the landmarks that matter to you: the chippy, the community centre, the tree that always drops something sticky, the bench where someone always sits. You are not making an ordnance survey map. You are making a map of how the street feels.

Step two: collect like a magpie

For one week, keep the paper. Receipts from the corner shop. Tickets from the Overground. Packaging from the bakery. A flyer for a choir or a lost cat. Ask friends and neighbours to save theirs too — this is a good excuse to talk to people.

A few practical notes: avoid greasy food wrappers unless they are properly clean and dry. Flatten crumpled paper under a heavy book for a day. If a scrap has a date, a street name or a logo on it, keep it — those details become anchors later.

Step three: sort by colour and memory

Tip everything onto a table and make loose piles: reds, blues, yellows, greens, greys, text-heavy pieces, image-heavy pieces. Don't overthink it. You are looking for texture and contrast as much as colour.

Set aside the scraps with words on them — a bus route number, a shop name, a postcode, a date. These will give the finished map its sense of place. The rest is background music.

Step four: sketch the bones

With a pencil, draw the main road or path across your board. Add a crossing, a junction, a patch of green, the canal if it's nearby. Keep the lines light and loose. Your map can be wobbly. It can be out of scale. It can be more diagram than geography. The point is recognition, not accuracy.

Mark where your landmarks sit: the bus stop, the café, the community centre, the shop, the tree. A few pencil crosses are enough.

Step five: build from the background up

Start with the largest pieces of paper: old flyers, envelopes, magazine pages, packaging. Tear them rather than cutting where you can — torn edges blend better and feel less rigid. Glue them down as fields of colour and texture. Think of them as the ground your street sits on.

Then layer smaller scraps. Strips of receipt can become road markings or the canal. A square of packaging can become a building. A coffee stain can become a roundabout, a pond or a puddle. Don't be precious. If something looks wrong, glue another scrap over it.

Step six: add your landmarks

This is where the map becomes yours. Use a bus ticket for the bus stop. A deli receipt for the deli. A gig flyer for the venue. A torn envelope for the library. Add hand-lettered labels in marker or pencil: street names, shop names, "bench", "tree", "best chips".

You can also add tiny drawn details — a cup, a leaf, a cat — but let the paper do most of the talking. The scraps already carry their own history.

Step seven: seal it and show it

Mix PVA glue with water, roughly one part glue to one part water, and brush it gently over the whole collage. This seals the paper and stops edges lifting. Let it dry flat. Add the date and your name in a corner. Hang it up, give it to a neighbour, or prop it on a shelf.

Where to swap scraps and learn more

You don't have to do this alone. Camden's community noticeboards are full of people who make things. Look at the boards in Kentish Town Library, Camden Town Library and Swiss Cottage Library. Check the windows and noticeboards at Kentish Town Community Centre and Castlehaven Community Association. Independent cafés and launderettes often have space for a scrap-swap box too.

If you want a bit of guidance, keep an eye out for low-cost collage and papercraft sessions through Camden Adult Community Learning, local community centres and the smaller workshops advertised in craft shops and community halls. Many are pay-what-you-can or free. You could also start a scrap swap in your building: a shoebox in the hallway with a note saying "take some, leave some".

Why this is worth doing

This is a sustainability project that doesn't feel like homework. It keeps paper out of the bin, yes, but it also makes you look at your street more closely. Every receipt and ticket is a tiny archive of ordinary life. Collaging them together turns the everyday into something worth noticing.

And it is genuinely accessible. You don't need a studio, a kiln or a spare room. You need a board, some glue and the willingness to keep a few scraps for a week. The result won't look like a professional map. It will look like your Camden — bit crumpled, a bit colourful, and full of stories.