The Tube Map is an icon of London,
just like Big Ben the Tower of London the London Eye and M&Ms World.
It's instantly recognisable to locals and tourists alike
known and loved and parodied all over the world.
With a new version coming out every few months,
some people are properly obsessed with the Tube Map
with vast collections and can spot the subtlest of differences
between different versions.
Eurgh. Look at them.
Massive bunch of nerds.
But don't take this map for granted. This map very nearly looked very different
and the London it's a map of might have looked very different as a result.
So, what is the story behind this map?
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In the mid-mid 19th century when privately run underground railway lines
first started popping down all under London
the only maps of them available were the ones
published by the private companies themselves
showing their own services in clear bold, and rival services, if they felt like it
in narrow faint lines they didn't want you to notice.
Because rival companies were often competing for the same passengers
they very often went out of their way to be uncooperative.
This circular route was operated by two rival companies who hated each other.
The Metropolitan Railway ran trains clockwise
and the confusingly similarly named Metropolitan District Railway
ran trains anti-clockwise. Long story.
If you wanted to go just one stop but you bought your ticket from the wrong booth
you had to go the long way round the circle.
And there were plenty more examples of uncooperativeness where this came from.
For example, if you wanted to change trains at Bank station
you had to take the lift up to the street, cross the road, buy another ticket
and then take the lift all the way back down again.
London's underground Railways could have been so much more
useful and attracted so many more passengers
if they were all run together as a coordinated system.
But it would take someone with a colossal bank account to make that happen.
Fortunately for Londoners, in 1902 that someone came along
in the form of ambitious American railway Tycoon Charles Tyson Yerkes
who had a colossal bank account, a colossal moustache
and a wife called Guttridge.
This is my wife. Go on, tell them your name.
Guttridge.
Charles's very American idea was to run a railway network
a group of lines stretching in all directions across the city
where with one ticket, you could start your journey on one line and end it on another.
So he set up a company called Underground Electric Railways of London
Or UERL for short.
Or ooerrl for shorter.
With all the money he'd piled, up he went on an underground railway shopping spree
including four lines that hadn't even been finished yet.
By November 1905, Charles Yerkes was the proud owner of the Charing Cross,
Euston and Hampstead, Metropolitan District,
Great Northern, Brompton and Piccadilly, Baker Street and Waterloo Railways.
And by December 1905, he was dead.
With the very shrewd move of dying,
he avoided having to pay back any of the huge debts he'd built up.
But his dream of creating an underground network in London had come true.
The UERL was a properly integrated system with common ticketing
and station buildings that looked really similar.
And a proper network needed a proper map.
And so in 1908 the UERL published this.
The first map that showed all the underground lines in London
mapped on one map, including the ones UERL didn't own.
It had some really handy innovations.
Each line was given equal thickness, and each line was given a different colour.
Features that are familiar to us today
Even if the colours aren't too familiar.
The Piccadilly line in yellow!? Hahahahaha!!
This complete map of the whole network was very useful
But it wasn't very easy to read.
With all the Tube lines and roads and landmarks
and... army and navy and auxiliary stores?
It was a messy clutter with too much information
and looked like a plate of spaghetti.
The problem was, the task of creating a map of the whole network
that was both useful and easy to read was a notoriously difficult one.
Lots of companies at this time published their own maps of London's network
each with their own approaches, some of them bonkers.
This one's my favorite: The Wonderground Map by Max Gill.
Simultaneously incredibly detailed and incredibly completely useless.
Mapping the entire system was only about to get even difficulter.
By the early 20s the London Underground had begun
sprawling uncontrollably out in all directions into the distant suburbs.
To help manage this growth, the UERL appointed a new head of publicity, Frank Pick.
Pick was obsessed with the Tube's corporate identity
the notion that the whole system should feel more... togethery.
It was Pick's idea for every station to have a roundel,
the iconic logo with the red circle and blue line.
And for every sign to use the same font with the
perfectly round O's and the little diamonds for dots above the I's.
And to commission all those lovely posters
that your middle class friends have in their kitchens.
Most importantly Pick wanted every leaflet and every poster on every train
on every platform and every station to use the same map design.
And so, in search of the perfect map,
Pick turned to a designer named... altogether now...
- (audience) Harry Beck. - Frank Stingemore. Aaah!
Frank Stingemore's map from 1924
used the River Thames as a geographical reference and nothing else.
No roads, no landmarks, no nothing. Just a plain beige background.
With easiness of reading at the top of Stingemore's priority list
his map did something that was basically cheating.
To fit all the detail in Stingemore took the naughty shortcut
of not bothering to draw the distant suburbs to scale.
For example, these stations on what we now call the Northern line
were bunched dishonestly together in a totally fictional straight line.
But the thing is though.. that's the thing...
The thing is, this, this is the thing...
The thing is... this didn't matter!
For passengers trying to get from station A to station B
this map still served its purpose perfectly well.
Unless you were driving the train, why did you need to know the exact length
or exact bendiness of each bit of track?
Come to think of it, even if you're driving the train
you don't really need to know that either do you?
Frank Pick was very happy with Stingemore's map
and the public were happy with it too.
Stingemore's innovation had shown that a map could still be useful
even if the scale was distorted.
And it was this concept that inspired another designer
to do something even more radical And his name was...
- (Is it Harry Beck?) - (It's got to be.)
- (It wasn't last time.) - (I think it's Harry Beck.)
- (Shall we say Harry Beck?) - (What if it's not Harry Beck?)
- (I think it is this time.) - (Let's say Harry Be...)
Harry Beck!
Henry Charles Beck, known as Harry to his no friends
was a 29 year old technical draftsman working at UERL.
It was his job to draw up diagrams of the Tube's signaling systems.
And then it wasn't his job anymore when he got made redundant in 1931.
Harry must have really missed his old job, because after leaving the UERL
he spent his spare time working on an extremely nerdy work-related project.
He nerdly imagined what it would look like
if all the stations on the London Underground were represented
connected like in a circuit diagram.
He'd seen strip maps of individual lines that totally ignored geography.
How hard could it be to combine them all together?
While Stingemore's approach was to be a little bit naughty with scale
Beck's approach was that scale could absolutely go [BEEP] itself.
Harry drew the entire network using only strrrraight lines
that were vertical, horizontal or at 45 degrees.
Here's one of his rough drafts
where he rubbed out lines and replaced them with straighter ones.
When he finally finished it looked like this.
An elegant colourful design
with the stations in central London spaced evenly apart
and the suburban stations bunched up close together.
No opportunity was missed for symmetry equal spacing and parallelity.
If you compare his design to a scale map
you can see just how not to scale and frankly mad it was.
Harry's so-called "Journey Planner" was not a map - it was a diagram.
But for the very specific job it was trying to do, a diagram was better than a map.
By totally ignoring the concept of scale,
he was able not only to fit all the stations in
but to make it much easier to read than Stingemore's map.
It also gave the impression
of a cohesive, comprehensive, coordinated, connected system.
It also looked awesome.
Harry was very pleased with himself and a thought occurred to him...
This should be the official map for London Transport.
Frank Pick is going to love this!
And so, later in 1931, Harry marched back into the offices of the UERL
which was now called London Transport
to show his diagram to Frank Pick.
But Harry was wrong.
Frank Pick didn't love Harry's map at all.
Pick refused to publish Beck's map on the grounds that it was "inaccurate"
and that the public wouldn't understand it.
There was indeed a disadvantage to the scale-free approach.
Some stations looked much further apart than they really were
which might make tourists crowd onto the tube for needless journeys
such as Queen's Road to Bayswater
which you can easily do on foot in 19.19 seconds.
But Harry Beck was convinced that his design
was the future of the London Underground
and tried several times to persuade Frank Pick.
Eventually, Frank Pick gave in
and agreed that if Harry Beck agreed to leave him alone
he'd agree to print a very limited trial run.
A small handful of copies were printed and sent to a small handful of stations
with an apologetic cover saying
"A new design for an old map. We should welcome your comments."
To the surprise of Pick and the I told you so of Beck,
the comments they welcomed were overwhelmingly positive.
The public seem to have no trouble understanding Beck's concept.
They bloomin' loved it!
In 1933, Harry Beck's diagram officially replaced Frank Stingemore's map
as the standard journey planner used on
all leaflets and all posters across the London Underground.
Harry Beck had done it!
But little did he know things were about to go very very wrong for him.
Want to find out more?
Stay exactly where you are and wait for the next dose of Unfinished London.
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