Biography
We get to the bottom of the London Underground's history – its construction, subsequent extension and the design of Harry Beck's map.
The Basics
You only have to look at the original version of the London Underground map, with its tangled spaghetti of interweaving lines, to know what a stroke of genius its successor was. Drawn up by Harry Beck in 1931, it was based on electrical circuit diagrams. The young draughtsman’s brainwave was to realise that the map didn’t have to show true distances, only the route to whichever destination you were heading for.
Building the Underground
Between 1801 and 1851, the population of Greater London more than doubled, from one million to 2.6 million. Streets were crowded with slow-moving horse traffic, and it took longer to cross the city by bus than to travel from London to Brighton on the train. The bold solution, suggested in 1845, was to make people travel underground.
Deeper and Deeper
The first underground lines, the Metropolitan, District and Circle, ran just below the surface. Building sub-surface lines was costly and caused massive disruption to streets, buildings and mains services. In 1870, a new kind of underground railway was built, using a deep tunnel bored through the soft but watertight London clay. This was the first of the "tubes".
Harry Beck's Iconic Map
The first maps of the London Underground showed how the Tube lines would appear from above, if we could peel away the surface of the city and look beneath the streets. These were difficult to use, with interweaving lines resembling a plate of spaghetti. Then, in 1931, Harry Beck, a young draughtsman in the signalling department of London Transport, had a wonderful idea.
