Frank Pick
Frank Pick Hon. RIBA was a British transport administrator. After qualifying as a solicitor in 1902, he worked at the North Eastern Railway, before moving to the Underground Electric Railways Company of London in 1906. He was chief executive officer and vice-chairman of the London Passenger Transport Board from its creation in 1933 until 1940.
Pick had a strong interest in design and its use in public life. He steered the development of the London Underground's corporate identity by commissioning eye-catching commercial art, graphic design and modern architecture, establishing a highly recognisable brand, including the first versions of the roundel and typeface still used today.
Under his direction, the UERL's Underground network and associated bus services expanded considerably, reaching out into new areas and stimulating the growth of London's suburbs. His impact on the growth of London between the world wars led to his being likened to Baron Haussmann and Robert Moses.
Pick's interest extended beyond his own organisation. He was a founding member and later served as president of the Design and Industries Association. He was also the first chairman of the Council for Art and Industry and regularly wrote and lectured on design and urban planning subjects. For the government, Pick prepared the transport plan for the mass evacuation of civilians from London at the outbreak of war and produced reports on the wartime use of canals and ports.
Early life
Frank Pick was born on 23 November 1878 at Spalding, Lincolnshire. He was the first child of five born to draper Francis Pick and his wife Fanny Pick. Pick's paternal grandfather, Charles Pick, was a farmer in Spalding who died in his forties, leaving eight children. His maternal grandfather, Thomas Clarke, was a blacksmith and Wesleyan lay preacher. As a child, Pick was bookish, preferring to read and build collections of moths and butterflies and objects found on the beach rather than take part in sports.Before becoming a draper, Pick's father had had an ambition to become a lawyer and he encouraged his son to follow this career. Pick attended St Peter's School in York on a scholarship, and was articled to a York solicitor, George Crombie, in March 1897. He qualified in January 1902 and completed a law degree at the University of London in the same year, but did not apply to practice.
In 1902, Pick began working for the North Eastern Railway. He worked first in the company's traffic statistics department before becoming assistant to the company's general manager, Sir George Gibb in 1904. In 1904, Pick married Mabel Mary Caroline Woodhouse. The couple had no children.
London's transport
In 1906, Gibb was appointed managing director of the UERL. At Gibb's invitation, Pick also moved to the UERL to continue working as his assistant. The UERL controlled the District Railway and, during 1906 and 1907, opened three deep-level tube lines – the Baker Street and Waterloo Railway, the Charing Cross, Euston and Hampstead Railway and the Great Northern, Piccadilly and Brompton Railway.The UERL had financial problems. Ticket prices were low and passenger numbers were significantly below the pre-opening estimates. The lower than expected passenger numbers were partly the result of competition between the UERL's lines and those of the other tube and sub-surface railway companies. The spread of street-level electric trams and motor buses, replacing slower, horse-drawn road transport, also took a large number of passengers away from the trains.
Branding
By 1908, Pick had become publicity officer responsible for marketing and it was at this time that, working with the company's general manager Albert Stanley, he began developing the strong corporate identity and visual style for which the London Underground later became famous, including the introduction of the "UNDERGROUND" brand. Pick's philosophy on design was that "the test of the goodness of a thing is its fitness for use. If it fails on this first test, no amount of ornamentation or finish will make it any better; it will only make it more expensive, more foolish."Pick became traffic development officer in 1909 and commercial manager in 1912. Albert Stanley replaced Gibb as managing director in 1910. During 1912 and 1913, the UERL increased its control over transport services in London by purchasing two tube railways, the City & South London Railway and Central London Railway, and a number of bus and tram companies. One of Pick's responsibilities was to increase passenger numbers, and he believed that the best way to do so was by encouraging increased patronage of the company's services outside peak hours. He commissioned posters which promoted the Underground's trains and London General Omnibus Company's buses as a means of reaching the countryside around London and attractions within the city. Realising that variety was important to maintain travellers' interest, he commissioned designs from artists working in many different styles.
At the same time, he rationalised bus routes to ensure that they complemented and acted as feeder services for the company's railway lines, tripling the number of LGOC-operated routes during 1912 and extending the area covered to five times its previous size. Sunday excursion services to leisure destinations were implemented to fully utilise otherwise idle buses and agreements were established with rural bus operators to coordinate services rather than compete with them.
Pick introduced a common advertising policy, improving the appearance of stations by standardising poster sizes, limiting the number used and controlling their positioning. Before he took control of advertising, posters had been stuck up on any available surface on station buildings and platform walls in a crowded jumble of shapes and sizes that led to complaints from passengers that it was difficult to find the station name. Pick standardised commercial poster sizes on printers' double crown sheets, arranging these in organised groups to enable the station name to be easily seen. The Underground's own promotional posters were smaller, using single or paired double royal sheets, and were arranged separately from the commercial advertising. Pick described the process: "after many fumbling experiments I arrived at some notion of how poster advertising ought to be. Everyone seemed quite pleased and I got a reputation that really sprang out of nothing."
To make the Underground Group's posters and signage more distinctive, he commissioned calligrapher and typographer Edward Johnston to design a clear new typeface. Pick specified to Johnston in 1913 that he wanted a typeface that would ensure that the Underground Group's posters would not be mistaken for advertisements; it should have "the bold simplicity of the authentic lettering of the finest periods" and belong "unmistakably to the twentieth century". Johnston's sans serif "Underground" typeface, was first used in 1916 and was so successful that, with minor modifications in recent years, it is still in use today.
In conjunction with his changes to poster display arrangements, Pick experimented with the positioning and sizing of station name signs on platforms, which were often inadequate in number or poorly placed. In 1908, he settled on an arrangement where the sign was backed by a red disc to make it stand out clearly, creating the "bulls-eye" device – the earliest form of what is today known as the roundel. In 1909, Pick started to combine the "bulls-eye" and the "UNDERGROUND" brand on posters and station buildings, but was not satisfied with the arrangement.
By 1916, he had decided to adapt the logo used by the LGOC, the Underground Group's bus company, which was in the form of a ring with a bar bearing the name "GENERAL" across the centre. Pick commissioned Johnston to redesign the "bulls-eye" and the form used today is based on that developed by Johnston and first used in 1919.
Expansion
In 1919, with a return to normality after the First World War, Pick began developing plans to extend the Underground network out into suburbs that lacked adequate transport services. The only major extensions made to the Underground network since the three tube lines had opened were the extension of the District Railway to Uxbridge in 1910, and the extension of the Bakerloo tube to Watford Junction between 1913 and 1917. Approved schemes put on hold during the war were revived: the CLR was extended to Ealing Broadway in 1920, the Hampstead tube was extended to Edgware between 1923 and 1924 and the C&SLR was reconstructed and extended to Camden Town between 1922 and 1924. Finance for the latter two extensions was obtained through the government's Trade Facilities Acts which underwrote loans for public works as a means of alleviating unemployment.For new lines, Pick first considered extending Underground services to the northeast of London where the mainline suburban services of the Great Northern Railway and Great Eastern Railway were poor and unreliable. Studies were carried out for an extension of the Piccadilly tube on GNR tracks to New Barnet and Enfield or on a new route to Wood Green and plans were developed for an extension of the CLR along GER tracks to Chingford and Ongar, but both mainline companies strongly opposed the Underground's encroachment into their territories.
Wanting to make maximum use of the government's financial backing, which was only available for a limited period, Pick did not have time to press the Underground's case for these extensions. Instead he developed a plan for an extension of the C&SLR southwest from Clapham Common to Sutton in Surrey. Pick still faced strong opposition from the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway and the London and South Western Railway which operated in the area, but the Underground had the advantage of already having an approval for the last few miles of the route as part of an unused prewar permission for a new line from Wimbledon to Sutton. The railway companies challenged the need for a new service, claiming it would simply drain passengers from their own trains and that any extension should only run as far as Tooting, but Pick was able to counter their arguments and negotiated a compromise settlement to extend the C&SLR as far as Morden.
Even before the C&SLR extension had been completed in 1926, possibilities for the northward extension of the Piccadilly tube began to reappear. From 1922, a series of press campaigns called for the improvement of services at the GNR's Finsbury Park station where interchanges between tube lines, mainline trains, buses and trams were notoriously bad. In June 1923, a petition from 30,000 local residents was submitted to Parliament, and in 1925, the government called a public inquiry to review options. Pick presented plans to relieve the congestion at Finsbury Park by extending the Piccadilly tube north to Southgate.
Opposition from the London and North Eastern Railway was again considerable and based on claims that the new Underground line would take passengers from the mainline services. Using data from the Bakerloo tube, Hampstead tube and C&SLR extensions, Pick demonstrated that the route planned for the new line would stimulate new residential development and increase passenger numbers for all rail operators in the area, increasing those on the Piccadilly tube by 50 million per year.
Parliamentary approval was granted in 1930 to extend the Piccadilly tube north beyond Southgate to a terminus at Cockfosters. The approval also included complementary extensions of the Piccadilly tube from its western terminus at Hammersmith to supplement District Railway services to Hounslow and South Harrow. The development was again financed with government backed loans, this time through the Development Act 1929. To ensure the most efficient integration between the new tube line and the UERL's bus and tram operations, the stations were located further apart than in central areas and where road transport services could be arranged to deliver and collect the most passengers. At Manor House, the station was designed with subway exits directly on to pedestrian islands in the road served by the local trams.