Long before the internet — and even before most people had telephones — major airlines maintained networks of city-centre travel agencies in almost every major city. These offices were more than just ticket counters: they acted as showcases for their airlines and, in many cases, as cultural outposts or “mini-embassies” for their home countries.

Tickets to Everywhere maps these historic locations in London, Paris, and New York, with more cities to follow. It also lets you explore selected airline route networks from the same era. On the surface, it’s an interactive, decade-by-decade map of airline offices across these cities. But dig deeper, and it reveals a vast and detailed record of a long-lost world of air travel.

This is by far my biggest solo digital project to date. It has involved manually mapping and researching hundreds of airline ticket agencies across multiple decades — tracking down photographs where possible (no easy task) and verifying each address against old timetables.

Spend a little time exploring and another layer emerges: from selected airline agencies you can follow the routes they offered at the time. Click on an Air India shop in New York in the 1960s, for example, and you’ll see the journey back to India.

It’s been a monumental undertaking — manually digitising historic airline timetables and painstakingly reconstructing their networks, one route at a time. The result is a step back to an era when the high street was alive with airline offices selling tickets to everywhere, each shop a small window onto a world of adventure.