When a dedicated fan asked the perennial gaming question of what London would look like inside the Grand Theft Auto universe, YouTuber CityEd decided to stop asking and start building. The creator has produced an ambitious, GTA-style reimagining of the English capital, complete with re-invented place names that follow Rockstar Games’ signature satirical cartographic conventions, and shared the finished project on their YouTube channel alongside a downloadable PDF version.
The thought experiment answers two questions that sit squarely at the intersection of GTA fandom and map-obsession: what if London existed in the GTA world, and what if Rockstar actually created a game set in the city? CityEd’s version offers a confident, detailed response, transforming familiar landmarks into the kind of exaggerated, joke-laden locations that populate every entry in the franchise.
A London Reimagined in Classic GTA Style
“I’ve created a GTA-ised map of London imagining how the map would look, and re-invented place names in a classic GTA style,” CityEd wrote on their YouTube channel, where the full map and a PDF copy are available. The renaming project is meticulous, swapping real-world locations for fictional stand-ins that nod to the area’s history and culture. Kings Cross becomes ‘Dukes Cross’, the Angel area becomes ‘Saint’, and the entire city is rebranded as ‘Trafalgar’.
CityEd’s goal was to carry Rockstar Games‘ naming conventions across the pond, capturing the developer’s signature satire, “exaggerated landmarks and GTA-style cartography” by using the studio’s past games as a reference point. “While the cities and places they base their maps on exist in real life, they have this fun convention for creating fictional place names where they find something historically or culturally associated with the place, exaggerate it, and use that instead,” they explained.
“I’ve created a GTA-ised map of London imagining how the map would look, and re-invented place names in a classic GTA style.”
CityEd, YouTuber
Starting from Scratch
There was one notable complication in the project. Rockstar’s last trip to the English capital came in the form of 1999’s GTA: London mission pack, which released before the studio began reimagining city names in its now-familiar playful manner. As CityEd noted, that earlier entry offered little in the way of naming inspiration, meaning the map had to be built largely from scratch rather than drawing on an existing template.
That turned out to be a blessing in disguise, producing what is genuinely a cool look at what could have been. To accompany the static map, CityEd released a longer, roughly 30-minute video that delves into their creative process and explains how the real-world history of certain locations informed their fictional reworkings, giving viewers a deeper understanding of the choices behind each renamed district.
Looking Ahead
Until then, CityEd’s London reimagining stands as a reminder of the creativity that flourishes around the franchise, offering fans a tantalising glimpse of how the world’s most notorious fictional cities might look if Rockstar ever decided to bring its satirical brand of chaos to the streets of the English capital.
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