Over the years, lines have been added including the Docklands Light Railway, the Overground network, Crossrail and the Emirates Air Line cable-car linking Greenwich Peninsula with Royal Docks. That means that, when big changes are made, everyone notices. Not only has it inspired countless Metro maps across continents, but it is also a staple of t-shirts, coffee mugs and countless other souvenirs. Since 1986, the design has been a corporate task, with names of individual designers – aside from Beck, who remains credited as the originator – subsumed in this never-ending enterprise. He abandoned this in 1965 but worked on the map privately, along with designs for the Paris Metro he had begun decades earlier, until his death in 1974. Its publicity officer, Harold Hutchinson, took over the design task.įeeling a sense of ownership and averse to seeing his design changed by third parties, Beck fought a long legal battle with London Transport. His last version was printed in 1960 when he fell out with London Transport. These design puzzles were solved over many years as Beck improved his map. Beck had been unable to include the western extremities of the District Line (shown in green), or the rural adventures of the Metropolitan (magenta) beyond Rickmansworth. It proved an instant success – a reprint had to be ordered within a month. After a test run of 500 copies were distributed from a select few stations in 1932, 700,000 copies of the map were printed in 1933. With a spirit of modernisation in the air, the time was right to see how the public would respond to Beck’s radical 'diagram'. In 1933, the Underground, city buses, trams, trolleybuses, river buses and Green Line coaches were brought together under the umbrella of a new public corporation: the London Passenger Transport Board. They allowed lines farther afield to drop off the edge of the city, as if they were ships sailing through the mermaid- and monster-populated seas of an unenlightened, flat world. So Underground maps of the time tended to concentrate on lines in central London.
As maps of the time took their cue from historical precedent, it was thought that these geographic distances had to be represented to scale.īut by 1930, it was clear that any map trying to plot the entire Underground network geographically was going to be too big to handle – especially in the busy confines of a Tube station, where shoulder room was precious. Outside the centre, the Underground stretched as far as Verney Junction and Brill in Buckinghamshire, rural outposts 50 miles from Baker Street.
Even in central London, there were stations like Covent Garden and Leicester Square just 200m from each other, while others like Kings Cross and Farringdon were 1.15 miles (1.85km) apart.
The sheer spread of the Underground network made mapping it problematic. After all, how could a designer fully represent lines that criss-crossed a few squares miles of central London yet also stretched across what, until as late as 1900, had been farmlands, markets gardens and remarkably remote Middlesex villages? And how could it all fit onto a single map – one that could be folded neatly into a coat pocket? The fact that there were so many Underground maps before Harry Beck’s famous 'diagram' of 1931 – the blueprint of today’s maps – was proof of a problem that took many years and a great deal of ingenuity to solve.
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