Submitted by David, who says: This all started about 17 years ago as an exercise to teach myself to use Macromedia Freehand. The years passed, Freehand became Adobe Illustrator, and I continued to work on it. The original Idea was to create an A4 sized map to carry around in my pocket, but it quickly became apparent that to contain the desired detail and remain legible it would have to be printed at A1 or […]
Passers-by looking at a pre-H.C. Beck Underground map outside Strand station in 1937. At a glance, it looks like the Fred Stingemore map, but expanded to show the whole system (the pocket card only showed central London). Parkland also seems to have been added – the large dark blotches dotted all around the map. Source: Londonist.com
QDo you know any official London Underground map that shows the Metropolitan Line/stations beyond Aylesbury (i.e. the Brill and Verney Junction branches) and not just mentions them in a ‘To’ box? ANo, I haven’t ever seen a map with “Underground” branding that shows the entire network and the Metropolitan Railway’s fullest extent out to the far reaches of Brill and Verney Junction, some 40-odd miles from London. The closest I can find is a Metropolitan Railway […]
Here’s something of an increasing rarity – a London Underground map that I haven’t seen before. It’s the 1941 edition of the Hans Schleger map, printed in brown and blue ink only due to wartime austerity measures. I’ve written about the first edition of this map previously (April 2014, 3 stars) which was notable for its use of a blue airbrushed effect to highlight the central part of the map. Its removal certainly improves the legibility […]
A map showing dates of openings (and closings) for stations and segments of track along the Northern Line. King William Street station was the short-lived northern terminus of the then-City & South London Railway (C&SLR) from 1890-1900. Via: Transport for London Tumblr
Phil Roe is a London Underground employee with over 40 years of service. While working in ticket offices in the 1970s, he was worried that he was too slow in calculating fares for customers, so he drew up his own fare zone diagrams for each station he worked at. The example below is for Green Park station, and the fares are in pence! His maps predate the official usage of zones on the Tube Map, […]
I’m loving this interactive map by Oliver O’Brien that uses entry and exit data direct from TfL to build a picture of how the Tube across the course of a typical day – with around 5 million rides or so. (The data doesn’t yet include the newly-introduced Night Tube, so things wrap up as the last “day” trains finish their journeys at the moment.) Watching the day progress is mesmerising enough – especially the flow […]
Look what I just found while going through some dusty old boxes! I picked this lovely Tube Map bathroom tile up at the London Transport Museum in 2004, and brought it with me when I moved to the U.S. – where it has unfortunately remained in its box ever since. As best I can tell, it was made by artist Tony Davis around 2001, and was part of a set of six tiles that covered most […]
Submitted by the map’s creator, who says: This is a route map of the GWR network. It’s my first time creating a transit map with Illustrator, so I’m open to any feedback! Transit Maps says: This is a pretty good first effort! In a way, this is a throwback to old railway maps, in that it shows where the trains travel, but not how they do so – individual routes aren’t indicated, so it’s impossible […]
For Johnston Sans’ 100th birthday, TfL has commissioned Monotype to redraw the typeface, bringing the design back closer to its original roots in many respects. Going forward, it will be this cut that will be used on all new TfL signage, maps and collateral. The redraw also introduces two new weights – Thin and Hairline – that I remain unconvinced by. I suspect they’ve been added for online usage and advertising purposes, but they just […]
