London’s Tube map, an icon of London almost as recognizable as Big Ben or Tower Bridge, is under attack from a university lecturer who’s calling it ‘garbage’ online and drawing millions of hits on his plan to redraw it in circles.
You can decide for yourself by clicking on the traditional and proposed versions in the slideshow below for a larger view, but you likely won’t be surprised that Maxwell Roberts isn’t drawing a lot of ‘likes’ from Transport for London officials.
The current map is the direct descendant of one drawn up by Harry Beck, a designer and technical draftsman whose masterstroke was recognizing that such a complex system could be either geographically accurate, or convenient and usable. Abandoning attempts to have everything to scale, he created a map that showed connections clearly using only horizontal, vertical and 45º lines, and showing each Underground line in a distinct color.
Beck’s map became the concept for nearly every large transit system map in the world, including New York and Paris. TfL calls it “an iconic piece of world-renowned design” and said there are no plans to change it.
Roberts is sticking to his guns, though, saying “The current state of the official London Underground map is lamentable for all sorts of reasons. It has poor balance, simplicity, coherence and topographical accuracy. It fails by any criterion of effectiveness you can imagine and has been in a neglected state of decline for years. I caused a stir a few years ago calling it a ‘garbage piece of lazy design’ and nothing has happened since to change my mind.”
