All posts tagged: United Kingdom

Historical Map: 1941 London Underground Map by Hans “Zéró” Schleger

November 15, 2016
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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 […]

Historical Map: History of the London Underground’s Northern Line (to c. 1975)

November 10, 2016
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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

Historical Map: Hand-drawn fare zone London Underground Map by Phil Roe, c. 1977

October 14, 2016
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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, […]

Submission – Idealised Edinburgh Tramways Map, c.1940s by Andy Arthur

September 13, 2016
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Submitted by Andy, who says: Hi, I recently got a bit over-fascinated and nostalgic about the old tramways network of Edinburgh and decided it would be fun to plot out a schematic routemap of the old system as it never quite was at some point in the late 1940s. I also had a little bit of fun trying to make it look like it just might have come out of the Corporation Tramways Department, even […]

Data Visualization: “London Heartbeat” by Oliver O’Brien

August 26, 2016
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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 […]

Historical Map: “Futuroute” Route Selector for Picc-Vic Rail Project, Manchester, 1970s

August 24, 2016
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Everything about this rather fabulous mechanical route selector – a unique piece created to build interest and publicity for the eventually-cancelled rail project – just screams early 1970s modernist design. From the gaudily coloured stripes on the case, to the tightly-spaced sans serif typeface, to the very name itself: “Futuroute” – literally the route for the future! Although I keep wanting to pronounce it as “futuro-route” rather than the intended “futu-route” for some reason… The unit is now […]

Submission – Official Map: Whippet Buses, Cambridgeshire, England

July 15, 2016
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Submitted by Tim C, who says: Here’s the route map of Whippet, Cambridgeshire’s “other” bus company. Frankly their route map is a far better effort than Stagecoaches! Brilliantly, their small buses are called Whippet Puppy, and when out of service their matrix displays say “Woof!” which is just fantastic. Transit Maps says: There’s a definite aesthetic appeal to this map, with an intelligent use of 30-degree angles and a nice hierarchy between the coloured (main) routes […]

Found: London Underground Map Tile

June 24, 2016
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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 […]

Submission: Unofficial Map – Routes of the Great Western Railway by Xsanda

June 17, 2016
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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 […]

Video: New “Johnston100″ Typeface Family by Monotype

June 14, 2016
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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 […]