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 […]
Really nice work here. What I love most is that these aren’t just neon copies of the official maps (that’s London above, not really looking like Beck’s map at all) but are the artist’s own interpretation of each system. Click on the source attribution below to go see all the other systems on the designer’s website – he’s made installations based on many cities, including Paris, New York, Tokyo and others. Side note: shame on […]
More proof of just how ingrained the Tube Map is in the English psyche is evident in this billboard advertisement for Double Diamond beer – inserted as the punchline in the long-running “Only here for the beer!” campaign. The ad campaign itself is almost as much as part of England as the Tube Map; the tag line has entered into the vernacular, much like “Where’s the beef?” in the U.S., and “Not happy, Jan!” in […]
Great photo of a old and weather-worn Tube Map, taken at White City tube station. If you look closely, you can see that more than one layer of map is visible in certain sections, giving sort of an archaeological cross-section of different eras (See the doubled-up interchange station symbols at Euston for a good example). The most visible map seems to date from the early 1970s as it shows the Highbury branch of the Northern […]
Riffing off the Tube Map is not entirely a modern phenomenon, as this Penguin book cover from 1977 shows. (Re)design by John Carrod. Source: coversetc/Flickr
Mesmerising stuff. One dot equals one person’s journey. More details on the project here.
Thanks to Robert McConnell, who let me know that the map I featured in my last post is actually a modern digital map made by none other than Maxwell Roberts. Roberts states that he based his version of the map off one that Beck produced, unsolicited, in 1938 and that a copy of this version is in Ken Garland’s excellent book, “Mr. Beck’s Underground Map”. I own a copy of this book, so was a […]
Here’s something via Chris Applegate on Flickr, where Chris says: Finally put up and framed the gorgeous vintage Tube map I won in a competition yonks ago. It is gorgeous, but it’s not just a Tube map, nor is it anything I’ve ever actually seen before. It appears to be a Greater London Tube Map/main line railway diagram produced in a Beck-like style – a precursor to this 1988 “London Connections” map (May 2013, 3 stars) […]
Question: Which of Beck’s maps of the London Underground do you most prefer, and what properties does it have that elevate it above the others in your opinion as a designer? Answer: My absolute favourite Beck-drawn Tube Map is actually his unpublished 1961 Victoria Line proposal, which I wrote about in this post back in 2012. Go take a look at it – it’s simply gorgeous, with an arrow-straight lavender Victoria Line cutting directly across […]
If you ever wonder just how much the Tube Map is ingrained into British culture, then I think we have the answer here: drawn (and drawn well) by a six year old, complete with National Rail interchange icons. Fantastic! This is my representation of the London Underground map (which I am very interested in) and shows the journey from my house to my Daddy’s work near Waterloo (identified by the star – which is unfortunately […]
