The London Underground is the world’s oldest underground railway. In the decade or so that I’ve been specialising in Tube maps I’ve seen spiralling interest in collecting the cartographic record of 150 years of underground travel. Hundreds of maps have...
At the entrance of any modern Tube station are racks of passenger maps, free for anyone who needs one. The familiar format is very practical. Each map folds out to reveal three panels. It fits easily into the pocket and...
This post is a follow-up to Colouring Inside the Lines At last I had the opportunity to trawl through back issues of the Evening News for 1907, and it proved to be very fruitful. The Evening News and its readers...
Fred Stingemore’s contribution to the mapping of London’s Underground has been somewhat eclipsed by the reputations of the designers who came before and after, MacDonald Gill and Harry Beck. It was Gill who stripped away the surface topography completely, including...
It is easy to overlook that fact that by 1933, when the first edition of Harry Beck’s famous diagram was presented to the public, Beck was able to draw on a full sixty years of earlier attempts to map London’s...
I’m facing one of those conundrums which occur in the daily life of an antiquarian mapseller. A map I’ve never seen before, not described in any of the relevant bibliographical material, no author, no imprint, no date. Ho hum. Here...
Astute commentators have already noted that the 1939 Sydney Underground map is “strikingly similar” to Beck’s diagrammatic Tube map (see, for example, Claire Dobbin in London Underground Maps). It has even been suggested that this is the first straight copy...
