The art of mapmaking: redrawing London Underground

Although its bold colours and scrapping of scale meant that it was initially rejected by the directors of the Tube, the map – as any visitor to London can attest – became iconic, the stuff of a million mugs, tea towels and mouse mats.

Almost 100 years later, and with the addition of more than 250 new stations and several new lines, the map is still recognisable as Beck’s original work.

But, while Beck set out to create a simple way of navigating the increasingly complicated spaghetti of a Tube network with little consideration of his legacy, the success of his map has hung heavy over mapmakers ever since. No one in London has dared to tinker with its schematic principles of straight lines and neat angles. And, as the maps of many other cities’ subways show, its influence has spread: a huge proportion of subway systems across the world have tried to adapt it to their own networks regardless of its suitability.

Even in London, as the network has sprouted more lines and brought much of London’s overground web into its fold, the bright spectrum of Beck’s map has given way to a Pantone colour chart of barely perceptible shade differences. Who, at a glance, can tell the difference the green Suffragette Line and slightly darker green District Line, or the maroon Metropolitan Line and the burgundy Weaver Line? Is the Beck map still fit for purpose?

“The problem with the map is that it dates a long way back,” says Dr Maxwell Roberts of the University of Essex’s Department of Psychology. “If you go back to 2000, it’s been updated and [new elements] patched in … But to call it a Frankenstein map is too kind because at least when Frankenstein was assembling his creation, he was looking for good quality parts. This is an arbitrary design collection. It’s like going to a scrapyard and trying to assemble a car.”

Ouch. Roberts’s comments might not have Beck turning in his grave – he was, by all accounts, a very modest man – but it is something of a surprise to hear this sort of gloves-off description of such a beloved design. Nevertheless, Roberts is not merely carping from the sidelines. He has redrawn the Tube map – and several other cities’ underground system maps – into a far more logical and reader-friendly scheme.

It is as radical reimagining of Beck’s map as Beck’s map was of the original looping, tangled underground map. He has created circular sections of London and, while it does not pretend to be geographically accurate, the positioning of the stations aligns much closer to their relationship with each other than on the current map. (There are apocryphal tales of cabbies taking hapless tourists from Euston Square station to Euston station, a journey of about 150 metres in reality, but with nothing to indicate that on the map.)

There is a harmony to its composition and, most importantly, it is easy to read – making sense of the recently upgraded London Overground lines, Wimbledon tram link and other, more suburban additions. It takes him, he says, about two weeks to design a map and he has done about 200. One of the hardest tasks is fitting in some of the station names. King’s Cross/St Pancras International is a particular challenge.

But why is a psychologist involving himself with what many regard as a purely technical task?

“Psychology tells you what you should be aiming for in terms of effective design and my branch makes maps as clear as possible when it comes to quality and amount of information,” says Roberts. “The other thing that psychology gives is it’s a way of evaluating something. Designers have massive faith in their creations and they don’t always get things right. Psychologists have the methods of measuring and evaluating [work]. If Transport for London does evaluation, it doesn’t do it very well. They’re entrenched in marketing methodology rather than more scientific methodology.”

Roberts has been fascinated by the Tube map from boyhood. He grew up in the south London suburb of Dulwich, a neighbourhood without a tube station, and collected free, pocket Tube maps on days out. “When I was a teenager [in the 1980s], I noticed they didn’t look as nice as the older ones.”

He embarked on a career in academia with a particular interest in intelligence, reasoning and problem solving. Maps are an excellent means of testing his research and, in particular, ‘cognitive load’ – the amount of effort your brain needs to process information – and ‘cognitive capacity’, the amount of information any individual’s brain is able to process. Too much information is very much a bad thing and so too is a lack of precision.

“Ambiguous information gives us problems,” says Roberts. “[Designers] aren’t thinking the problem through carefully enough. They’re not thinking about what is needed.”

One of Roberts’s favourite ways of illustrating how poorly information can be provided is to take unsuspecting individuals to the V&A Museum – one of London’s most prestigious – and tell them to find the 20th Century Gallery without asking for help. Not many, it would seem, succeed.

“Sometimes you think [things] are too complicated and the best way to make the map better would be to close down half the lines. But the more complicated, the more you have to invest, in my opinion,” he says. “Every city is different, and to be successful [in conveying information], you have to identify the design rules that allow you to satisfy the best design.”

But lest we think that bad mapping is a purely British disease, Roberts has strong opinions on the subway maps of many cities outside the UK. While he has a soft spot for Stockholm’s metro and St Petersburg’s “hasn’t been ruined”, New York’s old scheme was “a chaotic monster”; Madrid’s is “appalling”; Paris “follows London’s design rules but doesn’t make them easy to understand; Amsterdam “I’m not a big fan”; Tokyo is “quite a challenge”.

Perhaps, however, maps are under threat less from bad design and poorly thought-out information than they are from technology. The march of all-conquering journey planning apps and software has relegated their importance and made us all a bit lazy – something that has not escaped Roberts who applies the rule of thirds. 

“A third of people like maps and timetables. A third of people don’t particularly like them but will use them. A third of people don’t like them and won’t use them. The current status of mapping is so bad that it’s forcing people towards the apps, even if they don’t want to use them. There are people who prefer to think the journey out themselves but they’re almost being prevented. [Using maps and diagrams] is something we should encourage. You learn self-sufficiency.

After all, he adds, “understanding maps is a great skill and what is going to happen when your phone battery runs out?”

Explore Maxwell Robert's circular redesign of the London Underground map below