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Recent posts about the lives of some of the less well known makers of London Underground maps generated a flurry of very pleasant correspondence. Thank you! This piece is all about encouraging even more of it, especially if you have any information about anyone who made maps for London Transport and its predecessors – we’d really like to hear from you.
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A deeper dive into the life and works of Harold F Hutchison, a London underground map designer mostly famous for sacking Harry Beck. We’ve done our share of Hutch-shaming over the years, so consider this a mea culpa…
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Let’s look at three names which appear on maps of the London underground: WE Soar, JC Betts, and EG Perman. These names are familiar but normally catalogued (by me and everyone else, including the Transport Museum) with surname and initials as given, without further elucidation. Who were they?
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Everyone’s a sucker for ‘lost’ or ‘abandoned’ tunnels, and we at Bryars & Bryars are no exception.
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The London labyrinth and the origins of the Metropolitan Railway
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Whip it good: colour-coding the Underground
Read OnEverybody loves a good flow chart…
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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 can be unfolded, even at platform level, without being carried away by a sudden gust…
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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 seem to have been fascinated by the latest developments underground. We have evidence that the…
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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 the River Thames, leaving behind a clean but still geographically recognisable design. However, it was…
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