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, […]
Thanks to Oliver O’Brien and CityMetric for finding this new Tube map that highlights the new Elizabeth Line (the line formerly known as “Crossrail”) route across London. (Side note: I think I’ll call this line the “CrossLiz” from now on, as – let’s be honest – the Queen always looks a tiny bit cranky these days.) First off, let’s examine the CrossLiz itself. Placing an entirely new line right through the centre of an already crowded […]
Here’s a little video primer about H.C. Beck’s famous Tube map, put together by the London Transport Museum’s Acton Depot. It’s a breezy little introduction to the most famous and influential transit diagram in the world, but it unfortunately repeats and perpetuates a couple of misconceptions about the map and Beck himself. (I’d expect a little better from the London Transport Museum!) At first, I even thought the initial statement that Beck was “out of work” […]
Just to show that there’s always a different way to approach the same design problem, here’s a completely different reworked Tube Map by art director/designer, Rich Cousins. Like me, Rich seems to have reached a breaking point where all the additions to the Tube Map over the years have made him say, “there must be a better way!”, although his criteria for a successful redesign are quite different to mine. Note that this map dates back […]
What happens when I completely redraw London’s Tube Map in the style of the Tube Map? Not an alternative map, but a rigorous reconstruction of the real thing to bring it back in line with its diagrammatic roots. Read about the project over on my design blog.
Brought to my attention by Russell Morris on Twitter, this is a new official TfL map that shows the approximate walking time between London Underground stations in Zones 1 and 2. While it’s nice to see that TfL has recognised the desire from the public for alternative maps of the network (see also the recent official TfL “geographic” map), this is about as low budget as a “new” map could possibly be. It’s basically Zones 1 […]
Passport design has come a long way in the last few years, often being transformed from relatively dour official documents into elaborate and detailed expressions of national pride. The new UK passport is no exception, with the theme of “Creative United Kingdom” tying all the page designs together, celebrating over 500 years of artists, landmarks and architecture, the performing arts and iconic innovations – including this spread for the London Underground, prominently featuring the Tube Map. […]
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 […]
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
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) […]
