Beck had been unable to include the western extremities of the District Line or the rural adventures of the Metropolitan (magenta) beyond Rickmansworth. So it seems fitting then, that for the 155th anniversary of the London Underground to pay a visit to the plaque. In 1981, the tube switched from per-station pricing to the simpler system of zones, and most maps now show the zonal boundaries. We should welcome your comments.” In the event, Beck’s map was a clear hit: the original print run of 750,000 was snapped up in a month, requiring a further 100,000 to be printed almost immediately. Cold water swimming: Why an icy dip is good for your mental and physical health. Find Harry Beck’s Blue Plaque In 2013 Harry Beck was finally given a dedication in the form of a blue plaque. That means that, when big changes are made, everyone notices. It proved an instant success – a reprint had to be ordered within a month. But he retained an interest in London’s transport system, and with time on his hands, set about on a project to "tidy up" the tube map by — as he would later recall — "straightening the lines, experimenting with diagonals and evening out the distance between stations". © 2020 Londonist, All rights reserved. The book explores the phenomenon of imitation tube maps… Its publicity officer, Harold Hutchinson, took over the design task. London Underground accepted no argument that the current map was influenced by his work, or that it was an inferior design. The result was a map that no longer represented the true shape of London – and thus couldn’t be superimposed on a street map, as earlier attempts had been – but did allow more stations to be represented with larger text. 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. November 11th 2002. A dream about a map that would shape London’s future. The tube map is a London icon. Harry Beck was born in east London on June 4 1902 and began his career as an engineering draughtsman at the London Underground Signals Office during the 1920s. As the independent railways of the 1800s merged into a single system, the first map, published in 1908, looked like this: It was, self-evidently, a mess. He wrote numerous letters to the management, but was repeatedly fobbed off. Employed at London Underground's Signals Office as a technical draughtsman, in 1931 he devised a revolutionary map of the London tube system based on an electrical circuit diagram. Even then, Stingemore wasn’t able to fit in the furthest reaches of the tube system: the Bakerloo, Metropolitan and District lines are all cut off at the edges of the map. As can be seen above, this clearly shows the simplified geographical version then favoured as well as the tube system […] There are plenty of differences between Beck’s first effort and the map we know today. The 1932 London Underground map – the map being used before Harry sorted us out. The tube map is a London icon. Station names had to be written in small text, often at odd angles so they could be crammed in between awkwardly twisting lines. In 1981, the tube switched from per-station pricing to the simpler system of zones, and most maps now show the zonal boundaries. Required fields are marked *. Eventually Beck gave up and abandoned his relationship with London Transport, although not before submitting his own idea of how the Victoria line might be represented: Beck might take some satisfaction from the fact that Hutchison’s map was not widely admired, and in 1962 another London Transport employee named Paul Garbutt stepped in to fix it. 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. The experiment was fairly short-lived, and the diamonds were ditched in 1937. Stingemore’s work was clever, but its impact was far from earth-shattering: the Underground Electric Railways Company of London (UERL), which operated the tube, continued to publish large geographical maps alongside handy pocket-sized copies of his diagram. Add to basket. The first schematic Tube map was designed by Harry Beck in 1931. The man who created the tube map we know today was Harry Beck. Harry Beck was the designer of the iconic London Underground map. It isn’t only artists who have been inspired by the map. This led to a global standard that most transport networks now follow. For the first time in nearly 30 years, London Transport (as UERL had by now become) created a new version of Beck’s map, updated to show the new Victoria line, without consulting him. 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