Field notes · Nº 17 3 min read Building things that last

London's Tube map leaves out almost all of London.

By Pallav Sharma · Co-founder & CTO
On a dark background, one line is drawn twice. Above, labelled 'The city above', a faint route wanders like the ground, with stations at uneven intervals and a winding river beneath it. Below, labelled 'Stops and changes', the same stations sit evenly on a gold line of straight runs and one 45-degree bend, two of them ringed, with the river reduced to straight strokes; faint dashed ties join each station to its redrawn self. Headline: 'The rarest accuracy is accuracy to the person using it.' Pallav Sharma, www.pallavsharma.com.

In 1931, Harry Beck, a draughtsman on the Underground, redrew the network in straight lines and 45-degree angles. Of the city above, he kept only the Thames.

The Underground first turned it down as too radical. Published in 1933, it is still the template for today’s map and for transit maps worldwide.

I see it as a portrait of the passenger. Below ground, a trip is only stops and changes, and Beck drew exactly that.

The rarest accuracy is accuracy to the person using it.

Which design have you trusted so long that you forgot someone drew it?

Going deeper

Before 1933, maps of the London Underground were drawn the way maps of most things are drawn: faithful to the ground. The lines bent where the tunnels bent, and the stations sat at their true distances, which packed the centre of the city into a small, crowded space.

Harry Beck had worked as a draughtsman for the Underground since 1925. In 1931 he proposed something that looked like a different kind of object. Every line ran horizontal, vertical or at 45 degrees. The crowded centre was given more room than the suburbs, so its names could be read at a glance. Of all the geography above, only a simplified Thames stayed.

The Underground first turned it down as too radical. Beck resubmitted it, a trial print followed in 1932, and in 1933 it reached the public. Passengers took to it at once. Beck went on refining it for almost three decades; his last version was printed in 1960. The diagram he began is still the template for the map today, and its ideas run through transit maps across the world.

What I find remarkable is the quality of attention behind it. Below ground, nobody sees the curve of a tunnel or the true distance between two stations. A passenger wants the line, the direction, the number of stops and the place to change. Beck looked at the network from that seat, and had the nerve to let everything else go, including the shape of the city itself.

Every great design carries a picture of the person it is for. Sometimes the picture is so exact that the design looks wrong to anyone standing elsewhere, as Beck’s did to those who first turned it down. Generations of passengers have since read it without a second thought, which is the highest compliment a design can receive.

Truth to the ground is common. Truth to the person is rare, and it lasts.

Sources

English Heritage: Harry Beck blue plaque · TfL: Harry Beck’s Tube map · London Transport Museum: Harry Beck, 1902-1974 · London Museum: How Harry Beck revolutionised the Tube map · Wikipedia: Tube map