London Underground - Harry Beck

Harry Beck

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Henry Beck (1901-74)
London Underground map
1933
Lithograph on paper
Museum no. E.816-1979
Given by Ken Garland Esq

Henry Beck's London Underground map is the most famous transport map in the world, and an icon of 20th-century London. Beck was an unemployed engineer when he first devised the map. Prioritising the relationships between the lines and stations, rather than geographical accuracy, he used a method that recalls electrical circuit systems.

Source[TheVictoria&AlbertMuseum]

The striking Tube map that is recognised across the globe was the brainchild of Underground electrical draughtsman, Harry Beck, who produced this imaginative yet stunningly simple design back in 1933.

Beck based the map on the circuit diagrams he drew for his day job, stripping the sprawling Tube network down to basics.

The result was an instantly clear and comprehensible chart that would become an essential guide to London - and a template for transport maps the world over.

Beck's revolutionary design, with certain modifications and additions, survives to the present day and is set to serve London Underground and its millions of customers for many years to come.

Source[TFL]

Ken Garland on Harry Beck

The tube map almost never made it out of its creator’s notebook. The designer was Harry Beck, a young draughtsman who drew electrical circuits for the Underground. Beck’s biographer, Ken Garland, befriended him in the 1950s, and before the designer’s death in 1974 he uncovered the story behind the creation of what Beck called ‘the diagram’.

‘As a native of a small village in Devon and moving to London to study art, I found the metropolis impossible to navigate,’ Garland recalls. ‘I would get on the tube and see Harry’s diagram. London suddenly made sense, and so I asked people at the college if they knew who the designer was.’

Garland was told that HC Beck could be found at the London College of Printing, where he taught part-time, and he paid him a visit. They soon became friends.

Beck first drew his diagram in 1931 – a difficult time to be working for the newly established London Transport Passenger Board. With money tight, the board’s employees could be laid off at short notice. Beck, then 29, had been employed as a ‘temporary’ since he first started in 1925. While at work drawing an electrical circuit diagram, he had an idea: a new map that would raise the profile of the tube and attract much-needed new passengers, and that would make the system seem modern, quick, efficient – and, above all, easier to navigate.

At the time, the maps of the network showed individual lines run by different railway companies. It was geographically correct, but impossible to read. The lines snaked all over the place. The first map, published in 1908, betrayed the fact that different operators were competing with each other and could not agree where the Underground ended.

Harry laid out London’s Underground routes as he would a circuit board, and took it to the publicity department. He told Garland: ‘Looking at the old map of the railways, it occurred to me that it might be possible to tidy it up by straightening the lines, experimenting with diagonals and evening out the distances between stations.’

‘He was modest,’ recalls Garland. ‘He’d quietly taken the diagram to them and said: “You may be interested in this.” The publicity chiefs replied: “You can’t do it like this – the public will be really confused by the idea, no one will understand it.” ’

His idea was dismissed as ridiculous – people couldn’t understand why it wasn’t geographically accurate – and later he was laid off. Beck’s
dismissal made him suspicious of London Underground. He chose to sell the idea to them as a freelancer (for just ten guineas), giving him control over the future integrity of his design. But as work in his old office began to pick up, his former colleagues remembered him: they had appreciated his help in the tube workers’ orchestra and, in 1933, he was back on board and pitching his idea again.

Garland continues: ‘Beck would not take no for an answer. He went back with a revised copy, and finally they agreed to produce a small print run of 1,000 fold-out versions, put them in central London train stations and ask passengers for comments. One of the publicity team went to Piccadilly Circus and asked staff if anyone had been interested in the diagram. The maps had gone within an hour. Beck had been proved correct, and the publicity department arranged for a print run of 750,000.’

Harry Beck was good news for the tube. Passenger numbers had levelled off, and they needed a bright idea to sell the Underground. ‘Beck’s map was the catalyst,’ says Garland.

More than a million were in circulation within six months of being commissioned. Wall maps were next: Beck was paid a further five guineas to produce one. But for something that is so recognisable as a piece of ‘trademark’ art, Harry Beck was not, according to Garland, part of the modernist movement that was sweeping through the pysche of painters, sculptors, other designers and filmmakers of the period. ‘He was not influenced by contemporary art,’ says Garland. ‘He knew little or nothing about it.’

‘The diagram’, as Beck insisted it was called, was a lifelong obsession. As new routes were added, Beck would tinker with his design. He was constantly seeking to improve its clarity, and when the publicity department realised they had a hit on their hands, he had to fend off ‘helpful’ suggestions from tube bosses.

Beck added lines that were yet to be built: one route in a 1949 version has the Northern Line linking Finsbury Park on the Victoria and Piccadilly lines with Highgate. It gave Stroud Green and Crouch End their own stations, and Highgate became an interchange with a branch going to stations at Cranley Gardens, Muswell Hill and Alexandra Palace.

‘For the best part of 30 years, his home was turned over to the map,’ recalls Garland. ‘There were sketches all over the place. The front room would often have a massive copy spread out on the floor for Harry to pore over. His wife Nora would find, when making their bed, a pile of scribbled notes under the pillow that Harry had been working on in the middle of the night.’

But in 1959, after nearly three decades of working on the diagram, he was unceremoniously dumped from the project. Garland explains: ‘Harry went one morning to his local station and there on the wall was a diagram that was not done by him. It was devastating. To add to the insult, he thought it was a crude and ineffective version of his own diagram. It was signed by Harold F Hutchison, not a designer but head of the publicity department.’ According to Garland, Beck had become known in the publicity department for being ‘difficult’ when it came to the diagram, and there were moves to remove his stewardship.

Beck embarked on a letter-writing campaign to take back control of his life’s work. It was fruitless. London Underground accepted no argument that the current map was influenced by his work, or that it was an inferior design.

When Beck fell ill, his piles of sketches were destined for the dustbin, but Garland stepped in and saved them – recognising that they were crucial to understanding its development. Among the papers Garland saved was the first pencil sketch of the diagram, now at the V&A Museum.

The diagram’s iconic status should not be overlooked, says Garland. ‘It has touched so many people. The tube diagram is one of the greatest pieces of graphic design produced, instantly recognisable and copied across the world. His contribution to London cannot be easily measured, nor should it be underestimated.’ 

Source[Timeout]

After Beck

By 1960, Beck had fallen out with the Underground's publicity officer, Harold Hutchison. Hutchison, though not a designer himself, drafted his own version of the Tube map that year. It removed the smoothed corners of Beck's design and created some highly cramped areas (most notably, around Liverpool Street station); in addition, lines were generally less straight.^[8] However, Hutchison also introduced interchange symbols (circles for Underground-only, squares for connections with British Rail) that were black and allowed multiple lines through them, as opposed to Beck who used one circle for each line at an interchange, coloured according to the corresponding line.

In 1964, the design of the map was taken over by Paul Garbutt who, like Beck, had produced a map in his spare time due to his dislike of the Hutchison design. Garbutt's map restored curves and bends to the diagram, but retained Hutchison's black interchange circles (the squares however were replaced with circles with a dot inside). Garbutt continued to produce Underground maps for at least another twenty years — Tube maps stopped bearing the designer's name in 1986, by which time the elements of the map bore a very strong resemblance to today's map.^[9] Today, the Tube map bears the legend, "This diagram is an evolution of the original design conceived in 1931 by Harry Beck" in the lower right-hand corner.

While the standard Tube map mostly avoided representing mainline rail services, a new variant of the map issued in 1973, the 'London's Railways' map, was the first to depict Tube and surface rail services in a diagrammatic style closely matched to Beck's designs. This version was created by Tim Demuth of the London Transport publicity office and was jointly sponsored by British Rail and London Transport. Demuth's map did not replace the standard Tube map but continued to be published as a supplementary resource, later known as the 'London Connections' map.^[10]

Some alterations have been made to the map over the years. More recent designs have incorporated changes to the network, such as the Docklands Light Railway and theextension of the Jubilee line. It has also been expanded to include certain rail lines not part of the Underground network (see below), and to indicate which Tube stops connect with National Rail services, rail links to airports, and river boats. In some cases, stations within short walking distance are now shown, often with the distance between them (this is an evolution of the pedestrian route between Bank and Monument stations, which was once prominently marked on the map). Further, step-free access notations are also incorporated in the map.

In addition, since 2002 the fare zones have been added, to better help passengers judge the cost of a journey. Nevertheless the map remains true to Beck's original scheme, and many other transport systems use schematic maps to represent their services, likely inspired by Beck.

Despite there having been many versions over the years, somehow the perception of many users is that the current map actually is, more or less, Beck's original version from the 1930s — a testament to the effectiveness of his design. Beck did actually draw versions with other formats, 22½ degrees rather than 45 (the Paris Métro version uses 22½ degrees as a base); and an unused version for the 1948 Olympic Games.

One of the major changes to be made to the revision of the Tube map put out in September 2009 was the removal of the River Thames. Although historically the river was not present on several official maps (for example, according to David Leboff and Tim Demuth's book; in 1907, 1908, and 1919), from 1921 it was absent for several years (on pocket maps designed by MacDonald Gill). The Thames-free 2009 version was the first time that the river has not appeared on the Tube map since the Stringemore pocket map of 1926. This latest removal resulted in widespread international media attention,^[11][12] and general disapproval from most Londoners as well as from mayor Boris Johnson.^[13]Based on this reaction, the following edition of the diagram in December 2009 reinstated both the river and fare zones.

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