Tube map
The Tube map is a schematic transport map of the lines, stations and services of the London Underground, known colloquially as "the Tube", hence the map's name. The first schematic Tube map was designed by Harry Beck in 1931. Since then, it has been expanded to include more of London's public transport systems, including the Docklands Light Railway, London Overground, the Elizabeth line, Tramlink, the London Cable Car and Thameslink.
As a schematic diagram, it shows not the geographic locations but the relative positions of the stations, lines, the stations' connective relations and fare zones. The basic design concepts have been widely adopted for other such maps around the world and for maps of other sorts of transport networks and even conceptual schematics.
A regularly updated version of the map is available from the official Transport for London website. In 2006, the Tube map was voted one of Britain's top 10 design icons which included Concorde, Mini, Supermarine Spitfire, K2 telephone box, World Wide Web and the AEC Routemaster bus. Since 2004, Art on the Underground has been commissioning artists to create covers for the pocket Tube map.
History
Early maps
As London's early transport system was operated by a variety of independent companies, there were no complete maps of the network, just for the individual companies' routes. The maps were not typically schematic and were simply the line overlaid on a regular city map. There was no integration of the companies' services or any co-operation in advertising.In 1907, The Evening News commissioned a pocket map, The Evening News London "Tube Map". It was the first map to show all of the lines with equal weight being given to each line, and it was the first map to use a different colour for each line.
Another early combined map was published in 1908 by the Underground Electric Railways Company of London in conjunction with four other underground railway companies that used the "Underground" brand as part of a common advertising factor.
The map showed eight routes – four operated by the UERL and one from each of the other four companies:
- UERL lines:
- * Bakerloo Railway – brown
- * Hampstead Railway – indigo
- * Piccadilly Railway – yellow
- * District Railway – green
- Other lines:
- * Central London Railway – blue
- * City and South London Railway – black
- * Great Northern and City Railway – orange
- * Metropolitan Railway – red
The route map continued to be developed and was issued in various formats and artistic styles until 1920, when, for the first time, the geographic background detail was omitted in a map designed by MacDonald Gill. That freed the design to enable greater flexibility in the positioning of lines and stations. The routes became more stylised but the arrangement remained, largely, geographic in nature. The 1932 edition was the last geographic map to be published before Beck's diagrammatic map was introduced.
Beck's maps
The first diagrammatic map of London's rapid transit network was designed by Harry Beck in 1931. He was a London Underground employee who realised that because the railway ran mostly underground, the physical locations of the stations were largely irrelevant to the traveller wanting to know how to get from one station to another; only the topology of the route mattered. That approach is similar to that of electrical circuit diagrams although they were not the inspiration for Beck's map. His colleagues pointed out the similarities, however, and he once produced a joke map with the stations replaced by electrical circuit symbols and names, with terminology such as "Bakerlite" for the Bakerloo line.To that end, Beck devised a simplified map with stations, straight-line segments connecting them, and the River Thames; and lines running only vertically, horizontally, or on 45° diagonals. To make the map clearer and to emphasise connections, Beck differentiated between ordinary stations, marked with tick marks, and interchange stations, marked with diamonds. London Underground was initially sceptical of his proposal since it was an uncommissioned spare-time project and was tentatively introduced to the public in a small pamphlet in 1933. However, it immediately became popular, and the Underground has used topological maps to illustrate the network ever since.
Despite the complexity of making the map, Beck was paid just ten guineas for the artwork and design of the card edition, and another five guineas for the poster. After its initial success, he continued to design the Tube map until 1960, a single 1939 edition by Hans Schleger being the only exception. Meanwhile, as well as accommodating new lines and stations, Beck continually altered the design, such as changing the interchange symbol from a diamond to a circle and altering the line colours of the Central line from orange to red and of the Bakerloo line from red to brown. Beck's final design, in 1960, bears a strong resemblance to the current map. Beck lived in Finchley, North London, and one of his maps is still preserved on the southbound platform at Finchley Central station, on the Northern line.
In 1997, Beck's importance was posthumously recognised, and as of 2022, this statement is printed on every Tube map: "This diagram is an evolution of the original design conceived in 1931 by Harry Beck".
After Beck
By 1960, Beck had fallen out with the Underground's publicity officer, Harold Hutchison, who was not a designer himself but drafted his own version of the Tube map that year. It removed the smoothed corners of Beck's design and created some highly cramped areas, and the lines were generally less straight. However, Hutchison also introduced interchange symbols that were black and allowed multiple lines through them, as opposed to Beck, who used one circle for each line at an interchange, coloured according to the corresponding line.In 1964, the design of the map was taken over by Paul Garbutt, who, like Beck, had produced a map in his spare time because of his dislike of the Hutchison design. Garbutt's map restored curves and bends to the diagram but retained Hutchison's black interchange circles, although squares were replaced with circles with a dot inside. Garbutt continued to produce Underground maps for at least another 20 years. Tube maps stopped bearing their designer's name in 1986, when the elements of the map then had a very strong resemblance to today's map.
While the standard Tube map avoided representing most mainline services, a new variant of the map issued in 1973, the "London's Railways" map, was the first to depict Tube and above-ground mainline rail services in a diagrammatic style that closely matched Beck's designs. That version was created by Tim Demuth of the London Transport publicity office and was jointly sponsored by British Rail and London Transport. Demuth's map did not replace the standard Tube map but continued to be published as a supplementary resource, later known as the "London Connections" map.
Recent years
Some alterations have been made to the map over the years. More recent designs have incorporated changes to the network, such as the Docklands Light Railway and the extension to the Jubilee line. The map has also been expanded to include routes brought under Transport for London control such as TfL Rail and to note the Tube stops that connect with National Rail services, links to airports and River Services. In some cases, stations within short walking distance are now shown, often with the distance between them, such as 's distance from . Further, step-free access notations are also incorporated in the current map. In addition, the fare zones have been added to help passengers judge the cost of a journey.One of the major changes to be made to the revision of the Tube map put out in September 2009 was the removal of the River Thames. The river had been omitted from official maps on several previous occasions, and from 1921 it was absent for several years on pocket maps designed by MacDonald Gill. The Thames-free 2009 version was the first time that the river did not appear on the Tube map since the Stingemore pocket map of 1926. The latest removal resulted in widespread international media attention, and general disapproval from most Londoners as well as from the then Mayor of London, Boris Johnson. Based on the reaction, the following edition of the diagram in December 2009 reinstated both the river and fare zones.
In more recent years, TfL has expanded its rail services, notably with the expansion of the London Overground network, which has taken over a number of National Rail lines and brought them into the TfL network, each of them being converted lines being added to the Tube map. Further additions have been made such as the London Cable Car and the boundaries of fare zones. Some commentators have suggested that Beck's design should be replaced with a new design that can incorporate the new lines more comfortably.