If you’ve got a spare 1500 quid lying around, you could pick up this sweet London Tube coffee table by artist Alex Hammond for Christmas. Limited edition of 50. See also: MetroTable, a Moscow Metro-themed coffee table. Source: Alex’s website – link no longer active
Submitted by the awesome Gnimmel’s House of Maps, who says: There are a lot of infographics around which are based on the tube map, and a lot which are based on the periodic table. So I decided to combine the two. Here’s a tube map of the periodic table (see also here for more details) and there’s also a periodic table of the tube map. Transit Maps says: Science combined with a tube map equals a […]
This photo, shared by Flickr user IsarSteve, shows an absolutely amazing discovery. Construction work at the Knightsbridge Underground station in 1996 uncovered this stunning 1949 quad royal* poster of the Tube map. It looks as if the workers know they’ve found something wonderful as well, judging by the yellow and black warning tape surrounding the frame. For many, the 1949 tube map is the apotheosis of the Beck style, with his ruthless quest for simplification […]
Here’s another transit map made as a prop for a film, but with considerably more style and skill that the weird alternate universe DC Subway map for “Leverage” featured a while ago. At first glance, this prop – made for the 2008 film, “The Escapist” – looks like an exact replica of Harry Beck’s unusual and short-lived 1941 London Underground diagram, which uses 30- and 60-degree angles and “Olympic Ring” style station interchanges. Everything is […]
Just how influential was the original Harry Beck London Underground diagram of 1933? Certainly enough for Sydney, Australia to issue this nearly identical vision of its own suburban rail system in 1939, right down to its own version of the London Underground roundel. I’ve never been able to find out whether this map was authorised or licensed from the London Underground, or whether Sydney just thought, “that looks like a good idea, let’s do that!” […]
It seems I’m having a London Underground kind of week… When people ask me what my favourite version of the London Tube Map is, I always show them this. By 1961, Harry Beck was no longer responsible for producing the Tube map, it having been forcibly passed on to Harold Hutchison. However, more out of hope than anything else, he continued to produce new mockups of the map which he passed on to London Transport […]
Almost everyone credits Harry Beck with “inventing” the diagrammatic transit map in 1933 with his iconic London Underground map. But the diagram form had already been in use for a number of years before that, as shown in this delightful 1929 diagram for LNER suburban services out of London’s Kings Cross station to points north. It was designed by George Dow, who created many such diagrams for the LNER. His son, Andrew Dow, wrote a […]
