Sent my way by Roy himself are these two marvellous diagrams of bus routes in Nottingham, England. The first is from April 1975 and shows the two free downtown circulator bus routes, which certainly seemed to take quite the torturous route through some narrow old streets.

The second map is from July 1979, and shows the entire bus network in diagrammatic form. The routes are colour-coded based on their direction from the city centre, not unlike this contemporaneous Portland, Oregon TriMet bus map, with white routes indicating cross-town “suburban” routes.

Of particular note is the striking black background, bright colours and bold sans serif typography – this is very much a product of its era, though it still looks pretty fresh even today. The approach to locality names on the full map is interesting: they’re very large, but are layered behind everything else, even if that means that some of the label is obscured by route lines. Despite this, they’re still mostly legible because of the large font size. A clever touch to make things work with limited space. Possibly the least successful part of the map is the treatment of the River Trent: its crinkly “wave” edges seem a little light in comparison with the other elements of the map, and the whole element just recedes a little too far into the background for me.

The main map is also notable for offering the most apologetically British explanation of “Not to Scale” that I’ve ever come across:

Not to Scale
To present the information on this map as clearly as possible, the bus routes have been drawn diagrammatically and the city centre has been considerably enlarged.

Wonderful. Four stars!