All posts tagged: United Kingdom

Historical Map: LNER Northumberland and Durham Quad Royal Poster, 1934

October 11, 2013
Leave a comment
Filed Under:
Historical Maps
Tags:

Painted by prolific transport poster artist Montague B. Black, this lovely poster shows the services of the London and North Eastern Railway (LNER) in England’s north east in 1934. The view stretches from Middlesborough all the up the Northumberland coast to the Scottish Borders and beyond. Each city is painted in imprecise but evocative detail, as is Hadrian’s Wall, shown stretching from Carlisle to Newcastle across the centre of the map. The late afternoon colour […]

Fantasy Map: Tyneride BRT Network Map

September 30, 2013
Leave a comment
Filed Under:
Fantasy Maps
Tags:

Utterly plausible bus rapid transit (BRT) system map for the Tyneside region of England, designed as if it was a division of the Tyne & Wear Metro. While I can’t comment on whether Nexus/Metro would ever actually operate its own BRT network, I certainly can’t fault the aesthetics of the map itself. It’s absolutely spot-on, mimicking the look of the official Metro rail map (Nov 2011, 3.5 stars) perfectly. The 30/60-degree angles and the use […]

Detail – Elephant & Castle, London Bus Map

September 25, 2013
Leave a comment
Filed Under:
Official Maps
Tags:

When you have sixteen routes passing through one stop, it might be time to rethink your approach to station/interchange design. I do note that the current TfL “Buses from Elephant & Castle” spider map (external PDF link) shows this interchange with a geographical street map – a huge improvement which also has the advantage of showing you exactly where each bus stand is (there are eighteen!) and which buses stop at them. Source: Mach V/Flickr

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

September 9, 2013
Leave a comment
Filed Under:
Historical Maps
Tags:

Here’s a fantastic historical document – a tube map used by engineers in London to mark out the status of services on the Underground during World War II.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
Leave a comment
Filed Under:
Unofficial Maps
Tags:

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

Historical Map: “Explore the Yorkshire Coast” Poster, c. 1950s

September 5, 2013
Leave a comment
Filed Under:
Historical Maps
Tags:

Simply gorgeous mid-century poster designed for British Rail’s North Eastern Division by the prolific graphic artist, Reginald Lander (1913–1982). Yorkshire has never looked better, or so warm… look at all those people in bathing suits frolicking in the hot sun! The simplified map suits the angular design of the underlying painted scene perfectly, a real synthesis of design and art coming together as a cohesive whole. The section of line between Pickering and Whitby via […]

Historical Map: 1896 German Map of the London Underground

August 21, 2013
Leave a comment
Filed Under:
Historical Maps
Tags:

This map of the nascent London Underground and “other railways” appears in the 14th edition of Brockhaus’ Konversations-Lexikon, a respected German encylopedia that is still in business today. Now known simply as the Brockhaus Enzyklopädie, the 21st edition was published in 2006 and runs to over 24,000 pages in 30 volumes. The map itself is pretty simple and traditional, notable for being printed in three colours (black, red and a rather lovely teal blue). Production-wise, this […]

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

August 20, 2013
Leave a comment
Filed Under:
Visualizations
Tags:

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
Leave a comment
Filed Under:
Cutaway Maps, Historical Maps
Tags:

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 […]