All posts tagged: tube map

Historical Poster: “Be Map Conscious”, London Transport, 1945

October 15, 2013
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Historical Maps, Illustrations
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Here’s another beautiful old London Underground poster that features the Tube map, apparently produced to help servicemen unfamiliar with London get around. The poster, which basically acts as a Tube Map for Dummies guide, was placed next to the map in stations, with the abstract guard pointing towards it. The “tear-away” section at the bottom right shows a slightly modified version (angles aren’t at 45 degrees, the Aldwych spur is missing) of the central part […]

Historical Map: “Design for Shopping” Poster for London Transport, 1935

October 15, 2013
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You just can’t beat 1930s London Underground posters – a superb mix of art, design and branding. This one’s a real beauty! Of interest is that it playfully echoes the look of Beck’s Tube Diagram, then only two years old. Design by O’Keeffe. Source: Mikey Ashworth/Flickr

Historical Map: Diagram of Tube Services, 7:00am, September 28, 1940

September 9, 2013
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Here’s a fantastic historical document – a tube map used by engineers in London to mark out the status of services on the Underground during World War II. By the look of it, this map was updated at least daily, if not even more often, as this date falls squarely within the Blitz – a period where London was bombed for 57 consecutive nights by the Luftwaffe. The map itself looks like a modified hand-drawn […]

“Stitched Subways – London” by Susan Stockwell, 2007

September 5, 2013
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One of the loveliest reinventions of the London Tube Map I’ve seen so far – simply red thread stitched onto rice paper. It’s bigger than it looks: 100cm wide by 30cm deep, so it would certainly look impressive on a wall! Source: Susan’s website

Unofficial Map: Montreal Metro in the style of the London Tube Map by Corey Landels

August 26, 2013
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Mash-Up Maps, Unofficial Maps
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Here’s a fun little piece sent my way by Montreal-based designer Corey Landels: the Métro de Montréal redesigned in the style of the iconic London Underground map. While it’s definitely a fun little homage, I do feel that Corey could have pushed a little harder to match the designs more closely and demonstrate a better understanding of the “Beckian” principles at play behind the design of the Tube map (in short, absolute simplification of route […]

Visualisation: Three-Dimensional Real-Time Map of the London Underground

August 20, 2013
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A stunning visualisation of the London Underground by visual developer Bruno Imbrizi. There’s certainly a lot of fun to be had zooming, rotating and panning the view around and turning each line on and off. It’s another great example of what can be done with publicly-available data: in this case, train arrival times, the location of each station and its depth below the surface. Read Bruno’s explanation of the project here and view the visualisation […]

Historical Map: Bank-Monument Tube Stations Cutaway (1990s?)

July 17, 2013
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Cutaway Maps, Historical Maps
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Not a traditional transit map per se, but a stunningly beautiful technical illustration of the interlinking tubes and tunnels that form the connected Bank-Monument tube station complex in London. Built as separate stations, but linked by escalators in the 1930s (the depiction of which proved a permanent puzzle for H.C. Beck on his Tube Map), the complex is the ninth-busiest London Underground station, What I love here is that we’re looking at over 100 years […]

Photo: Charing Cross Road, London, 1995

July 9, 2013
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What a fantastic photo! More than anything, it illustrates how people actually use maps in real life. Now that a destination has been reached via the Tube, a street map is required for the next stage of the journey. There’s some serious study of that map going on here! Also, look at the Tube map on the wall behind our geographically-challenged subject. Charing Cross Road goes right past Leicester Square tube station, where I’m almost […]

File Under Awesome: London Tube Map Recreated With Lego Bricks

June 12, 2013
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Sent my way by just about everyone this morning, this Lego map is one of five located at Tube stations across London as another part of the Tube’s 150th birthday celebrations. Each map shows the Tube at a different stage of development from the 1920s right through to the version shown here: a near-future map for 2020. Painstakingly assembled from thousands of Lego bricks, the map looks great, although Neil Bennett from Digital Arts notes […]