The book about maps that became a best seller
YouTuber and author Jay Foreman is on the up - in more ways than one
YouTuber-turned-author Jay Foreman has always had a “geeky interest in maps” and could “get lost in them for hours, pun very much intended” as a child. These days Jay considers himself fortunate to have been able to parlay such a niche interest into a career.
I first met Jay on an RSY summer camp before either of us had become men in the eyes of God or just about anyone else. Jay was a celebrity during the summer of 1997 since he was never seen without a guitar and could play any song one threw at him, his ability to retain lyrics extraordinary in those heady days before Google.
We remained friends and ultimately ended up doing university comedy gigs together before sharing a flat in Edinburgh a decade after that first meeting, during a month in which we both had shows at the festival. Jay wrote and performed comedy songs that were, crucially, genuinely funny and before long he was supporting the likes of Dave Gorman on tour as well as other enviable gigs like providing the soundtrack to the prayers at my wedding.
In the late 2000s, Jay worked as a tour guide or at his father’s accountancy firm by day and spent his spare time “juggling stand-up comedy with a guitar with one hand and YouTube videos that were half comedy and half educational with the other”. Gradually, without him really noticing, the videos eventually took over to the point that, when he was filling in forms for insurance purposes, he found he had to write that he was a “YouTuber, with a capital Y and a capital T”.
In 2009, in collaboration with Paul Kendler, he made a documentary short, Unfinished London, that examined Northern Line extension plans that never came to pass – catnip for a Stanmore lad with a love of maps. Jay met Mark Cooper-Jones at a gig around this period (neither man can remember exactly when) and the comics bonded over a shared love of Monty Python and geography; the latter a subject Cooper-Jones actually taught until the comedy took over.
The pair teamed up to create Map Men, a YouTube edutainment series with viewers regularly numbering in the millions. Their debut book, This Way Up, was released in October 2025 and found its way to Christmas number seven in hardback non-fiction, a relief for Jay since, unlike YouTube, his dad understands the concept of an author. In Jay’s words, “The rest, as they say, is geography.”
In their years of collaboration as geographers, there is one story that has come up in three separate videos and a book chapter. Jay believes it is the most fascinating thing they’ve unearthed: “It turns out the Soviets produced a whole bunch of impressively detailed and accurate maps that could only be made using spies… There are maps of north London with all the text in Cyrillic that were never intended to be used by people living here, they were intended for use by people who might invade one day… They also made deliberately wrong maps in order to trick counterspies.”
His upbringing was fairly typical of the kind of suburban Jewish kids attending RSY Shemesh: “I was sent to cheder every Sunday and I had a barmitzvah and I can still recite rather a lot of my portion. We did Friday nights religiously, as it were… The Jewish upbringing I had sometimes seeps into my work.”
Though an atheist, he still considers himself Jewish: “Even though I’m not a practising Jew at all, it’s still in there. To me Judaism is all the fun memories of Friday nights and all the songs that are still in my head. I’ve explained to my son that being Jewish is like being part of a very, very, very big family.”
Clearly you can take the boy out of Canons Park but you can’t take Canons Park out of the boy. Jay’s YouTube career began in earnest with a video about north west London and, despite moving to Enfield, he still feels drawn to the environs: “Every time I look at a map, my eyes dart over to Edgware. It still, in my brain, is the centre of the universe.”
The success of the book means it may not be the last but, after a year of work, the pair are happy to return to video content that made their name. Jay has no concerns about running out of content: “One of the wonderful things about the topic we have chosen to bleed dry is that you will never run out of maps. Maps are basically a window into any story that you want to tell… The great thing about that is, as far as I’m aware, I don’t think we’re ever going to run out of stories.”
This Way Up is published by Mudlark, £8.49
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