Tuesday, February 12, 2013

The London Underground Map

Anyone who's braved the London Underground will be familiar with the underground map. It's stylish and geometric, but it bears no resemblance to the geography above. This wasn't always the case. At first, the tube map was as if superimposed ona a map of central London, just like the Paris Metro.


In 1931 a man called Harry Beck started to play around with the map, and though there have been departures in between, his basic idea of using no angle less than 45 degrees persists, making this huge, complex and still expanding network comprehensible in a way that spaghetti on a street map would not.

I'm hoping it will get bigger if you click on it...


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4 comments:

  1. Eliza8:20 pm

    The Tube still confuses me though..I'm very grateful for the London Transport website, it makes it sooo much easier to work out where I need to go :)

    I have got braver though, I use it when I come to see you, which I couldn't do the first time I came down

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  2. JoJo2:34 am

    I was only in London once in my life and I studied not only this map but a maps of London and i think it's laid out worse than Boston.

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  3. val8:04 am

    Don't forget, JoJo, that the city grew organically from ancient times, and even when there was an opportunity to rebuild the centre on a grid pattern after the Great Fire of 1666, the King and City authorities took so long to reach a decision, the owners of the premises that had burned down had already rebuilt on the old footprint.

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  4. Anonymous8:44 am

    I'm quite proud I've been 'lost' on both the Paris Metro AND the London Underground.

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