London underground map designer8/3/2023 ![]() ![]() 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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