Tag: London

The Truth About Harry Beck: A Play About the Tube Map’s Creator

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Cover image from The Truth About Harry Beck, a play now on at the London Transport Museum. It’s an outline cutout image of Beck with the London Underground map in the back.

The Truth About Harry Beck, a play about the designer of London’s iconic Tube map, is at the London Transport Museum’s Cubic Theatre through January. Writer and director Andy Burden spent years working on the play. So far reviews have been mostly positive: Theatre Vibe’s Lizzie Loveridge found it “charming,” Everything Theatre “warm,” and Broadway World calls it “as reassuring as a comfy pair of slippers,” whereas The Arts Desk’s take is more mixed and The Standard dismisses it as “chock-full of mugging, direct address and chuntering dimwittery.” BBC News coverage.

Not coincidentally, it’s the 50th anniversary of Beck’s death. London map dealer The Map House has an exhibition to mark the anniversary: Mapping the Tube: 1863-2023. They’re a map dealer so the displays are for sale, including a draft copy of the map and one of only five remaining first-edition Tube map posters. Runs from 25 October to 30 November, free admission.

Historical Maps of London

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Tudor London: The City and Southwark in 1520. Historic Towns Trust.

Londonist does a good job introducing us to two maps of old London published by the Historic Towns Trust a few years ago—a map of medieval London (1270-1300) published in 2019, and a map of Tudor London (1520) published in 2018 (and updated in 2022). The Historic Towns Trust publishes many maps of British towns and cities—historical maps, not reproductions of old maps (in fact, Londonist points out that no maps of London prior to about 1550 currently exist). The Trust’s London maps are also available as overlays on the Layers of London online map: Tudor, medieval. Some maps from the Trust’s British Historic Towns Atlas, which began publishing in 1969 and the earliest volumes of which are out of print, are also available as PDF downloads; here’s the page for London.

Kenneth Field Redesigns the Tube Map

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

One of two redesigned London tube maps by Kenneth Field. This one has a colour palette that is more accomodating to people with colour vision deficiency.
Kenneth Field

Kenneth Field has been a vocal critic of the London tube map’s increasing complexity and clutter. Earlier this year he advocating dumping the map and starting from a clean slate. At last month’s NACIS conference he revealed two versions of a redesign that does just that. Based on an earlier 2019 redesign exercise, this version is inarguably a Beck-inspired diagram; it just benefits from not shoehorning more and more information into an existing, already busy map. In fact, it removes quite a bit of information, relegating it to the index on the reverse side. And in his second variant (above), he commits what I gather is a minor heresy by removing the iconic colours of the original Tube lines, allowing the map to use colour to indicate mode and also accommodate people with colour vision deficiency. Ken explains on his blog post; his NACIS talk is available on YouTube.

Previously: Part Two of Unfinished London’s Tube Map History; Kenneth Field: ‘Dump the Map’; So the Launch of the New Tube Map Seems to Be Going Well.

Update, 16 Jan 2023: Commentary from Transit Maps.

Part Two of Unfinished London’s Tube Map History

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

And here’s part two of Jay Foreman’s history of London Tube’s map, which looks at its post-Beck existence and increasing clutter and complication. (To say nothing of Beck’s post-map existence.) Part one is here.

Previously: Unfinished London: History of the Tube Map; Kenneth Field: ‘Dump the Map’; So the Launch of the New Tube Map Seems to Be Going Well; Tube Map Adds Thameslink Stations, Becomes More Even Complicated; Has the Tube Map Become Too Complicated?

Kenneth Field: ‘Dump the Map’

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Kenneth Field is not a fan of the new Tube map.

Transport for London are doggedly clinging on to Beck’s iconic map, and continue to attempt to crowbar 18 separate lines/modes and 510 stations onto the map. It’s not just the additional infrastructure, but the additional demands by various stakeholders to include fare zones, accessible access detail, walkable elements, and now the location of IKEA stores due to a sponsorship arrangement. […] I’d contend the map is already an advert—of London. It’s recognisable and synonymous with the city. It’s just not particularly useful as a map any more.

His solution is fairly straightforward:

I’m not going to go through every issue I see with the map. […] Instead, I’m going to make a single appeal: dump the map. It’s no longer fit for purpose as a means to give people a clear, simple way to navigate London. Change it. Redraw it. Start over, and create a new map. It’s no longer a map of the ‘tube’. It’s a map of all the various interconnected transit systems in one of the world’s densest major cities with a fantastic public transport network. We need a new map to reflect the city.

Previously: So the Launch of the New Tube Map Seems to Be Going Well.

So the Launch of the New Tube Map Seems to Be Going Well

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Tube map (2022)
Transport for London

A new version of London’s tube map dropped a couple of weeks ago. It incorporates the new Elizabeth line—as well as IKEA logos indicating which stations are near their stores (IKEA paid £800,000 to sponsor the map). The Evening Standard talks with Transport for London chief designer Jon Hunter about the new design, which apparently took 18 months.

To say the least there’s been a bit of pushback from certain map design circles: yesterday’s MapLab has a good summary of the criticism. The map has been called out for being increasingly complicated in recent years, and this redesign doesn’t help. The interchanges in particular seem to be singled out as examples of egregiously poor design: see Diamond Geezer and Cameron Booth. Others, like Kenneth Field and Mark Ovenden, think the map needs nothing less than a complete redesign. Gareth Dennis is even willing to think the unthinkable: that “it’s time to retire the Beck-style Tube map and start again.” (On the other hand, Cameron doesn’t think the current map is all that Beck-like.)

Previously: Tube Map Adds Thameslink Stations, Becomes More Even Complicated; Has the Tube Map Become Too Complicated?

Topsy-Turvy: The London Underground in the Style of the New York Subway Map

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

London Underground map in the style of the New York subway map

Plenty of cities’ subway maps have been reimagined in the style of the London Underground map. Cameron Booth, for example, has redone New York’s subway map in that style. But a map posted by a graphic designer named Sean to Reddit does the exact opposite: it reimagines the London Underground map in the style of New York’s subway map. Bringing the design language of Michael Hertz to Harry Beck’s sovereign territory is probably blasphemous in some quarters, but as a pastiche of the New York style? Cameron says: “Sean has absolutely nailed the New York Subway map style, and perhaps even improved upon it in places—I note with pleasure that all of his station labels are set horizontally, instead of the many varied angles used on the official NYC map.” His bottom line? “One of the best style mash-ups I’ve seen: technically excellent, well-researched and actually really informative. Wonderful!”

It’s available as a print on Etsy, because of course it is.

London Cabbies’ Unique Brains May Help Alzheimer’s Diagnosis

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

The Taxi Brains Project explores whether London taxi drivers’ legendary ability to navigate could help diagnose dementia. London cabbies, who since 1865 start by spending three or four years memorizing the London road network in order to learn the Knowledge, have been found to have an enlarged hippocampus, the part of the brain involved in spatial memory. Meanwhile, the hippocampus shrinks in Alzhemier’s patients. Studying the cabbies’ enlarged hippocampi may offer insights that could improve early detection. The study is seeking drivers to take tests and get an MRI scan. See the Washington Post’s story for details. [WMS]

Tube Map Adds Thameslink Stations, Becomes More Even Complicated

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

The new temporary Tube map
Transport for London

Complaints that London’s Tube map has gotten too complicated are not new. So it’s not too surprising that Transport for London’s decision to add Thameslink rail services to the Tube map as of next month—temporarily, as a means of illustrating alternative travel options in the age of social distancing—is generating some heat. Thameslink already appears on TfL’s Tube and Rail map, but adding it to the Tube map proper is in some quarters seen as the final straw. Jonn Elledge at On London:

Once a design classic, the map has been ugly, and getting uglier, for a while. The rot started to set in with the baffling decision to show the fare zones using a series of irregular grey polygons that make it look like the familiar shape of the Tube network had been painted against the backdrop of the sort of artwork you’d find lining the corridors of a Gatwick Airport hotel sometime in the late 1980s.

But the bigger problem is that Transport for London have thrown more and more services onto the map without any apparent consideration for what it might need to change in order to accommodate them. Most of the map is still given over to the northern half of London, even though a growing share of the services it shows (the Overground, Tramlink, now Thameslink) are south of the river.

Diamond Geezer has some specific questions about what the map is doing. On YouTube, Geoff Marshall is more positive.

The new map isn’t up on the TfL site yet, but can be seen here.

Previously: Has the Tube Map Become Too Complicated?

The Mythology of John Snow’s Cholera Map

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

John Snow's cholera map (detail)

Kenneth Field explores (and dismantles) the mythology around John Snow, the discovery that cholera was spread by water, the role of the famous cholera map and whether it revolutionized disease mapping. Depending on what you know about the subject—if, for example, you got what you know from an episode of Map Men—what you know is more myth than history: the map came after the Broad Street outbreak, it was not by any means the first example of disease mapping, and John Snow wasn’t the map’s cartographer. Field:

The mythology surrounding his work, the 1854 epidemic, and specifically the role of the map are a fine story, but much of it is retold according to the version many seem happy to believe rather than what really happened. But the real story is just as interesting. There are plenty of excellent longer form discussions of the story in which you may be interested. In particular, Kari McLeod’s excellent article that goes into detail about the various myths, and an article by Tom Koch and Kenneth Denike also goes into detail about the true order of events.

London Trees, Pyongyang Architecture

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Blue Crow Media, which for the past few years has published a series of maps focusing on urban architecture, sent me samples of two of their most recent maps. The Great Trees of London Map is the first of a series of maps highlighting noteworthy trees in a city’s urban forest (Amazon). (A similar map for New York is forthcoming.) The second is another in their line of architecture and urban design maps: Pyongyang Architecture Map features 50 buildings in the reclusive North Korean capital, and includes text and photographs shot by Guardian architecture critic Oliver Wainwright (Amazon). An architecture map of Tbilisi, Georgia, in English and Georgian, has also been released (Amazon). Each map costs £8.

Previously: Architectural Maps of London; London Underground Architecture and Design Map.

Charles Booth’s London Poverty Maps Online

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Screenshot

Last year I told you about Charles Booth’s London Poverty Maps, a book collecting and analyzing the maps produced by Booth’s block-by-block survey of poverty and the social classes of late 19th-century London. Somehow I missed the fact that there has been an online, interactive version of said maps for several years now. [Open Culture]

Previously: Charles Booth’s London Poverty Maps.

Real-Time Transit Maps on Circuit Boards

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Traintrackr circuit board maps
Traintrackr

Harry Beck’s original London tube map was inspired by circuit diagrams, so it’s only fitting that TrainTrackr’s tracking maps showing the real-time positions of trains on the London Underground and Boston MBTA are literally circuit boards, using LEDs to indicate train positions. (They also have an LED map showing rainfall data in the British Isles.) Prices range from £99 to £249 (US$149 to $315). [Mapping London]

A Modern-Day Tube Map in the Original Tube Map Style

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Arturs D.

There have been a lot of Beck-style maps—maps done in the style of the London underground map. This one’s a bit meta. Arturs D., a student living in London, has created a map of the present-day London underground using Harry Beck’s original style. The current TfL network map (PDF) is, of course, a Beck-type diagram, but there have been a lot of changes to the official map since 1933. It’s also a lot more complicated. Arturs’s map, which limits itself to the Tube proper, reminds us just how many changes there have been. [Mapping London]