It’s almost bizarre to think that an enormous cosmopolitan city like London doesn’t have 24-hour rail service. Yes, there’s an extensive night bus network, but the Tube is such an integral part of the city that it seems odd that it just stops after midnight. 

However, that’s about to change on Fridays and Saturdays from September 12, as shown on this new map from Transport for London. I’ve already seen some positive commentary on it from the CityMetric site, but I’m afraid I’m going to have to completely disagree with them here.

Like many night maps, this map utilises a dark background… just in case we don’t get that it’s a night map despite the enormous title and the super obvious owl logo. However, the background is a dark blue, which leads to a bit of a problem when there’s also a blue River Thames, a blue Piccadilly Line, a blue Victoria Line and a black Northern Line. Although the problem is mitigated somewhat by keylining the routes in white, it still leads to a very low contrast map where the red Central Line stands out like a sore thumb in comparison to just about everything else.

Next, it’s obvious that the starting point for this map was simply the standard Tube map, and objects were then deleted until only the night network remained. I’ve actually overlaid the two maps in Photoshop, and many elements have been changed, moved or modified, but there’s still a lot of commonality between them. This leads to the rather ridiculous situation of route lines ducking and weaving all over the place to accommodate other route lines that simply don’t exist as a part of this network. The newly introduced bumps in the Central Line – designed to accommodate new Crossrail lines on the standard map – are still there, even though there’s no Crossrail to be seen. The incredibly convoluted fare zone boundaries are still there, wiggling hypnotically across the map like a bad psychedelic trip, even though most of the stations and route lines that force the zones into that configuration aren’t on the map at all.

You might argue that this configuration gives a sense of familiarity and continuity with the standard map, but I’m not buying that. This is a different, simpler network than the daytime map has to show. It really should be completely redrawn to adhere more closely to the principles that guided Beck’s original diagrams: evenly spaced stations and an absolute minimum of changes in direction along a route. A diagram like this should show the network it represents as efficiently as possible, and shouldn’t have to accommodate parts of a completely different network that aren’t even present.

Our rating: I’m pretty certain that H.C. Beck is turning in his grave right now. An ugly, nonsensical map that clings stubbornly to its daytime roots despite the absence of a huge portion of that map’s necessary detail and services. 1.5 stars.

Source: TfL’s Night Tube web page