It seems I’m having a London Underground kind of week…

When people ask me what my favourite version of the London Tube Map is, I always show them this.

By 1961, Harry Beck was no longer responsible for producing the Tube map, it having been forcibly passed on to Harold Hutchison. However, more out of hope than anything else, he continued to produce new mockups of the map which he passed on to London Transport for consideration, including this beautiful one from 1961. It was returned to Beck with a curt letter in December 1961, making it obvious that London Transport had no intention of rehiring him to work on future maps.

Have we been there? Yes.

What we like: A simply gorgeous hand rendering of the Tube Map. The stand out element to me is Beck’s masterful treatment of the proposed Victoria Line, which runs at a perfect 45-degree diagonal from end-to-end. He had to rebuild the entire map to achieve this, but the end result is worth the effort. Compare this treatment to today’s Tube Map, where the Victoria Line runs at unconvincing angles to fit into the existing layout.

What we don’t like: Strangely, the Piccadilly Line spur to Aldwych runs inside and then across the main line, when it would be simpler to run it straight down on the right. An unusually complicated detail from a man so normally driven to simplify and clarify.

Our rating: The apotheosis of the Beck style. Almost everything is reduced to its simplest form. His ability to take apart his own work and put it back together in a more compelling form has never been better shown. 5 stars.

Source: Scanned from my personal copy of “Mr. Beck’s Map” by Ken Garland, Capital Transport Publishing, 1994