Where the Heck..?
“The Chronicles of the Deathless Stray” Behind the Scenes
One of the things I do to try to present a better setting for outdoor scenes in my webtoon is study and compare many MANY maps. It's funny, because I've never considered myself good at deciphering maps even though the whole point of them is to simplify the layout of an area. (I have a terrible sense of direction and before GPS, my anxiety went through the roof whenever I had to drive to a location with only a map and a list of directions to guide me). Although the Chronicles of the Deathless Stray is very obviously fiction and should be viewed as a sort of alternate universe, I wanted to try to keep things relatively accurate… So, because I have never been to England, let alone Regency Era England, researching maps have become a necessary step in preparation for working out at least semi believable scenes.
Take for example, the scene when Kitty is coming from Hyde Park by carriage while Jade is walking on foot away from South Kensington. How likely would it be for them to cross paths, and where could it believably happen?
Keeping in mind that roads and architecture have changed throughout the years, I had to make sure that the road I decided to be the best one for the scene had actually existed in 1820.
This is just a a picture of Hyde Park from 1833
After scouring some different maps, I though Crommell Road was a promising location, however, although it existed on the maps I’d been comparing, a quick google search led me to find out that it hadn’t actually existed until roughly 1860. So I scratched that option, and continued scanning for another road.
After I had finally settled on a location that I deemed good enough, I looked up pictures of the area in an attempt to have accurate visuals for the scene's background. I discovered one of the best ways of finding old pictures is by searching Pinterest. People share their images and mark them with keywords that make finding specific images a bit easier, and I’ve gotten more accurate results that way over googling so far.
A sketch of an entrance to Hyde Park from the 1800’s
Even then, it does take a lot of weeding through photos and prints to try to find exactly what I’m looking for. I just wish I had a magic website that allowed me to simply insert an image from something like Google's maps and then ask for it to be transformed into the 1820's version. But since that is so far NOT and option, I did actually end up using google maps satellite images to help myself work out that meeting scene. It may not be perfectly accurate for the time, but hopefully it still made the whole thing feel more real.
google screenshot
Panel from Chapter 11
