Harry Beck would be turning in his grave

The case for a new Tube map.

Well, thank heavens that election’s over, and I can go back to writing utterly spurious nonsense about history or animals or, this week, transport infrastructure. This one went to paying subscribers back in February. As ever, if you want to read this stuff as it comes out, rather than late, or possibly never, you know what to do:

One of the most popular genres of columns, with those who write them if not those who have to read the bloody things, can concisely be summed up thus: “This latest news just confirms the need to do the thing I’ve always thought we should do anyway.” I mention this here, just so you understand that there is at least a modicum of self-awareness in everything that follows.

Four years ago, in a shameless bid for viral nerd content, I started a Twitter thread about why the London Overground network should have names and what they would be if it did. That turned into an article, and a few months later I persuaded Rory Stewart, of all people, to take an interest in the plan during his brief and bizarre period of walking the streets of London asking strangers if they might offer him a place to sleep and also if they’d like him to be mayor. A year after that, a promise to create individual line identities found its way into Sadiq Khan’s 2021 manifesto, and while the only evidence I have that this was anything to do with me is a half-remembered conversation with a policy advisor at the next year’s Labour Conference, I’ll take it. 

All of which means that the Thursday last February when Transport for London unveiled the names of the new lines, and the whole city spent hours furiously debating them, was a pretty big day for me personally. I wrote about the new names for the Guardian. I talked about it on the BBC World Service’s Newshour. I got a pretty big kick out of imagining listeners in Toronto or Tehran listening, baffled, while I debated the finer points of London transport nomenclature. 

But I, very much the Mick Jagger of transport commentary, am not satisfied. There is more to be done. As I told the audibly shocked BBC World Service presenter, Tim Franks, when he praised the clarity of London’s tube map, the map lost its way a very long time ago. The re-branding of the Overground provides a great moment to rethink things from first principles.

The purpose of the line renaming is, essentially, that it makes the network more legible. As things stand, neither maps nor journey planners make any attempt to distinguish between the six-ish different routes branded as the London Overground. Giving the routes their own colours, shown on the map as parallel tramlines to distinguish them from Underground lines of similar shades, will make it easier to see at a glance which route you want, so you don’t mix up a journey via Shoreditch with one via Bethnal Green and Hackney. Transferring that branding to physical station signage will mean you can be sure you’re going to the right platform at stations like Clapham Junction or Highbury & Islington, too.

Continuing London’s tradition of giving lines names, rather than numbers or letters, also seems calculated to make things as clear and memorable as possible. It probably isn’t a coincidence that each of the new line names suggests an image or a concept, rather than a mere geographical identifier: even if you don’t remember the England’s women’s football team’s victory in the 2022 Euros, which frankly I didn’t, you’re going to remember the Lioness line, possibly because it suggests a big, girly cat, possibly just because of the mildly annoying half-rhyme. 

So having at first been a bit sniffy about the new names, at least partly because not one of them is within a million miles of the ones I’d suggested, I now find that I rather like them. As John Bull argued on London Reconnections, it encodes aspects of London’s history into its transport map, and when people inevitably Google the origins of the lines’ names, they will find themselves learning things they didn’t know. (I had no idea about the role of the Mildmay Hospital in the AIDS crisis.) And christ, it’s better than naming yet more lines after the bloody monarchy, like we did the last three.

Against all that, though, there is one way in which all this is going to make things even less clear. The word “clarity”, after all, can refer to both legibility and how clean a design is. Compare the tube map from 1994...

...with the one that’ll be in place by the end of the year. 

A lot of things have changed in the past three decades. TfL has taken on a lot more services – that’s great, but they seem to have been added to the map without anyone asking whether they can be squeezed into a diagram which warps geography in a manner designed specifically for the map as it existed in the late 20th century. (Just look how busy that north east quadrant now is.) Another is that TfL decided to show wheelchair accessibility levels for every station, which is genuinely useful, but messily designed. Then there’s the decision to replace the clean white background with the increasingly wacky fare zone system – 2/3 is not a number guys – which is not useful at all and which, as a bonus, makes the whole thing look bloody hideous, like the sort of art work you’d find lining the halls of a hotel next to a motorway in the late 1980s.

And then there’s the problem that very little thought seems to have gone into what the map is for. It now shows every TfL service that isn’t a bus, but implies that they come in only two flavours, tube (solid) or not tube (parallel lines), even though this distinction tells you nothing about, say, service frequencies, and also that the latter is now five pretty radically different things (Overground, Elizabeth line, DLR, trams, cable car). The map then introduces a third type of line to show every branch of Thameslink, which isn’t a TfL service at all. The ostensible logic of this is that the middle bit (Elephant & Castle/London Bridge to Kentish Town/Finsbury Park) was quite useful a few years ago when part of the Northern line shut down for several months, but it’s still there today, accidentally implying that anyone from Slade Green or Petts Wood can rely on tube-like services (they can’t). The map does this while simultaneously suggesting that anyone travelling from Waterloo to Clapham Junction is best off travelling via West Brompton or Clapham North, rather than taking one of the literal dozens of fast direct trains doing the journey direct every hour.

Oh, and, my personal favourite detail is this: the official Transport for London Tube Map now shows the Elizabeth Line in a completely different colour to the one used on Transport for London signage and in Transport for London trains. How do you mess this up so badly you use different colours on maps and in signage for the same bleedin’ line? 

It feels to me that all this was the result of perhaps a dozen different decisions, each, if not good, then at least justifiable. Their combined result, though, is rubbish. I’ve been trying to find a phrase for this, too, and I’m not sure there is one – closest I’ve come, via Lauréline VK, is “verschlimmbesserung”: a German word for an improvement that makes things worse. 

But the Tube Map – the original Tube Map – is a design classic for a reason. Harry Beck’s great insight, that geography didn’t matter in a closed system and you could reduce the network to a sort of circuit diagram, didn’t just make the diagram easier to read: it also made it beautiful, which of course is why everyone started nicking his ideas. It’s hard to imagine anyone having the same reaction today: its current custodians have piled more and more information on without ever apparently stopping to think how it affected the look of the whole. 

There was nothing inevitable about any of this. There are alternative tube maps out there even now which still stick to Beck’s design principles: if you want to show off your abilities as a graphic designer, your own version of London’s Tube Map is one of the first places you’d turn. Here’s one from Wikipedia by a chap calling himself “SameBoat”:

And here’s another, by a guy named Jug Cerovic, which incorporates the National Rail network, too:

You may or may not prefer them to the TfL version. But what they undeniably have over it is that they’ve been thought out from first principles: they haven’t simply been tinkered and patched like some kind of cartographical Frankenstein’s monster.

The map is about to undergo a redesign to incorporate the new line names. A bunch of signage is going to change, too. So go on, TfL, finish the job. Start again with a blank piece of paper – think about what the Tube Line needs to show, what can be left to the more comprehensive London Tube & Rail Map, how best to communicate things like transport mode as well as service levels as well as accessibility and fare zones. You’re redesigning everything anyway. Why not tear it up and start again?

Or to put it another way: this latest news just confirms the need to do the thing I’ve always thought we should do anyway.

The inevitable sales pitch bit

Now that the election is over I probably need to start banging on about the book again. Here’s what Al Kennedy said on BlueSky:

Really, do you want to risk being on a beach without it? Of course you don’t. It’s available from Amazon, Waterstones, Stanfords, Foyles, Bert’s Books and all good bookshops. Oh, and also, if you enjoyed the above, please consider becoming a paying subscriber, my dog, he is so hungry: