Harry Beck

Harry Beck was an English draughtsman who created the present London Underground Tube map in 1931. Beck drew up the diagram in his spare time while working as an engineering draftsman at the London Underground Signals Office.

After years of working for the London Underground, Beck became fed up of the very complicated and overcrowded underground map, so he devised his own design.  The original map showed all of the stations exactly where they were in real life, which meant that there was a mass of messy squiggles and station names splattered everywhere, because the tube lines bend and weave everywhere.  And what’s worse is that the map even had the thames and some above ground roads displayed on it.  All of this made it very hard and confusing to navigate.

So Harry Beck decided to scrap the idea of portraying every station in their real-world location, and instead opted for a much simpler design, where all of the stations were equally spaced apart, no matter how far apart they were spaced in real life.  The map only portrayed the stations, and ignored everything above ground, except the Thames.  The bends were always positioned at either a 45, or 90 degree angle.  He changed the colour of some of the lines, most notably the circular line, which he made red; this was a clever idea because red draws the eye’s attention more than any other colour, and the central line runs through the middle of london, so it is one of the most important lines, that the most amount of people would be using, so he made it easier for the majority to locate their desired stations.

He was very proud of his map, and since he thought it was a much better improvement on the then current map being used, he approaced London Underground with his map, but it was too radical and different for them at the time.  But he went back and insisted it was better than the current map, and eventually they gave in.  The map was very well recieved by the public.  So afterwards they commisioned him multiple times for newer versions of his map.  And the rest is history.