Beck Map Man

Question - if you're designing a map of the London Underground, do you need to show what's above ground?

Answer - no. At least, that's the view taken by a man called Harry Beck

when he produced his world famous Tube map in 1933.

Along here is Harry Beck's amazing design.

Over 1 billion people use the Tube every year. This map is known all over the world.

It's London made simple. There are no streets, no landmarks.

It's been called the most successful practical map of all time.

What I'd like to know is why it's been such a success, and whether it's the ultimate subway guide.

Beck was an electrical draughtsman working in London during the 1930s.

He can't have imagined that one day his map would turn into this.

For souvenir shops on London's Oxford Street, Harry Beck's map is a big seller.

It's on absolutely everything - tea cosies, thongs, aprons.

More than any other map I know, this one has transcended it's original purpose.

Before Beck, Tube travellers made do with this -

meandering underground lines laid over a confusing sprawl of surface geography.

In contrast, Beck's schematic diagram emphasises simplicity and order.

He uses the old orange Central line as his horizontal axis,

and diamonds to show interchange stations.

Lines don't crash into each other - they intersect,

and stations stand at equal distances apart.

Travel in London, it says, is easy, wherever you're going.

Living in London, you take the Tube for granted,

but I remember the thrill I felt when I came as a child - the long descent into the underworld,

the roar of the wind being pushed ahead of the train as it arrived,

then that short, careering ride through dark tunnels - every Tube ride was a journey into the unknown.

Harry Beck had worked for the underground as a freelance. When he made his map, he was unemployed.

Mulling it over at home, he'd got it into his head that the old Tube map was hopeless.

It showed too much of what was above ground and was difficult to use.

What he had in mind was simpler, based on the wiring diagrams he was drawing for his day job.

Instead of wires, Beck drew Tube lines,

and instead of electrical components, he drew stations.

It was a revolutionary idea.

A map without measurements? Wiring diagram? Shocking thought!

Beck's map was rejected for being too revolutionary in 1931.

The following year, he submitted it again,

but it wasn't until 1933 that his Underground bosses gave it a trial run.

Even then, they continued to issue the old-style maps with street names and surface geography,

so they weren't sure Beck's would be a success.

We don't know much about how this extraordinary commuter made mapmaking history,

but I'm hoping the privilege of seeing his original Tube map

will gain me an insight into the real Harry Beck.

This is the hand-drawn presentation sketch that Harry Beck

came up with in 1931 and presented to the Underground as his big new idea.

This is the only example of a really key design coming up from the ranks, if you like.

This was a lowly employee who came up with a brilliant idea,

which initially those in a higher position were not very keen to accept.

He made a decision of genius about the Circle line.

Yes, which in those days, right back from its origination,

had been called the Inner Circle in those days, was jointly worked by the Metropolitan and the District.

It's shown here as the lower bit is District in green, and the upper bit is Metropolitan.

It wasn't until after the war that they changed that into its own line,

which is the ring around Central London.

I notice that there are quite a few places on this map where names have been changed.

Yes, especially on the Piccadilly line, where they've closed some of the stations

in order to speed up journey time from the outside.

That's why Beck's already begun to make some adaptations of his sketch here.

He's already had to rename what was Dover Street Station, what became Green Park,

and Down Street Station, which was between them there, has disappeared completely.

That's the reason this particular section looks a bit messy.

Perhaps the best way to understand the design of a great map is to try to recreate it.

That's the challenge today's designers face

every time there's a new line or a station changes its name.

In Underground circles, Tim Demuth is famous for kinking the Central line down to Bank.

and for removing the escalator graphic back in 1988.

And Alan Foale is the current designer of the map.

I've asked them to help me create my own underground line.

I'd like to create a new route that links two parts of London that are not connected by the Tube.

Muswell Hill up here, I'd like to run it down here through Chalk Farm, so I can get on the New line, too,

then down here towards Hyde Park

to the Royal Geographical Society on Kensington Gore, because they have no Tube station,

and then down over the river to Battersea, because there's no Tube connection to Battersea here.

There used to be a line going from Highgate up to Alexandra Palace,

-which went through Muswell Hill.

-Did there?

-Let's do the top bit first.

-Right.

Finchley Road, because that's already an interchange station.

-Just rotate that.

-Yes.

-So you're moving the Finchley Road label.

Yes. We've so little room

to generate a line through there, we have to make space for it,

so we'll move Swiss Cottage and St John's Wood southwards.

Are you aware of how much power you're wielding? No other mapmakers can shift things all over the place.

We are aware. It's an iconic map and it's an honour to draw such a thing, and you do it the right way.

You're very mellow for masters of the universe!

-How do we get to Royal Geographical Society?

-That's where it gets hard.

-We could run it straight down.

-Yes. There you can see the problems.

-We're running through Lancaster Gate.

-We've had a major collision with the Circle.

-Yes.

-And with the Piccadilly line...

-Why don't we shove South Kensington Station further along

-towards Sloane Square.

-We've a space here.

We're going to have to move the diagonal bit of the Piccadilly line to the right.

-They've all got to be diagonals, verticals or horizontals.

-Yes.

-Can we not make an exception?

Some people do, and it looks awful.

-We have to stick to these rules, which we've concocted for ourselves.

-Why? Rules are for breaking.

Just for my line, do a 30 degree just to get around.

-Not on this map.

-No.

If someone goes up to an Underground poster map,

they're more likely to read it if they can see it as a friendly image, and that is a balanced design.

Symmetry.

Yes, and the relationship of lines to each other.

-What shall we call the Royal Geographical Society?

-Kensington Gore.

-Kensington Gore.

Let's put the rest of the line down from Chelsea over the river,

then we need a fork, maybe north of the river,

so one arm goes down to Wimbledon and the other goes to Balham. Always wanted a line ending in Balham.

Lovely. Look at that. Magnificent.

Can we not get rid of the Thames, cos it's doing nothing on the map?

It's giving a lot of help - people know if they're north or south of the Thames...

You've just removed it. What an amazing improvement. No Thames!

Now everybody in South London is connected, because the dividing line is the Central line. Please keep it.

No.

-Oh!

-Lastly, we need to give the line a name.

Shall we go down to the key? We've already put this new shade of green in. What's your surname?

-Crane - C-R-A-N-E.

-Let's call it the Crane line.

-What an immense honour.

I hope it doesn't break down too often.

Beck's map, with its electrical diagram design, is not about geography, but geometry.

It seems to be infinitely flexible.

New lines appear, stations come and go, but the map remains the same.

'Mind the gap.'

Did Harry Beck have a deep understanding of geometry

or did his day-to-day commuting make him realise what it was passengers wanted?

Beck knew that Tube travellers didn't need geography, but clarity -

what he called "heightened common sense".

You needed to be able to check your interchanges quickly, often in dim light and make instant decisions.

That's why he rejected the existing Tube map.

It looks like a spilt bowl of spaghetti. Which would you rather use?

This mess, or Beck's brilliant, simplified map?

To reinforce his simple message, Beck gave each line its own bold colour.

Did he know anything about colour or was he simply an intuitive genius?

The map's ablaze with colour - the full spectrum, like balloons at a children's party.

I wonder if he realised the colours would sink into our minds, like vivid dreams.

Red for the Central line, blue for the Piccadilly. Could they be any different?

There's a lady in Chelsea who knows all about how we react to colours.

What a wonderful idea it was to colour code it -

it's such a speedy form of communication, colour.

Imagine the map in black and white.

It would take hours to figure it out.

Beck made a number of important changes to the colours of the lines.

One of the earliest was to switch the orange Central line into red.

-What do you think of that?

-That was a very good move.

Red is the colour that grabs the attention first. It has this property of appearing closer than it is.

We see it first, and since the Central line is just that - it runs right through the centre -

it kind of defines and orients us immediately.

There was one other focal line on the map, that's the Circle line,

and Beck chose in 1949 to colour that yellow.

Was that a smart move?

I think it was a smart move. Yellow is the most visible colour.

Psychologically, yellow is quite an emotive sort of colour.

It acts on our emotions, lifts the spirits, creates a sense of optimism and cheerfulness,

which, of course, is a very good colour to enclose the centre of this vibrant city of ours.

The green of the District line he inherited from existing Tube maps, and he kept that green.

Yes, well, green is complimentary to red, and it therefore shows up very well in contrast,

Green is a reassuring colour, and if you're going on the Underground, it can be a little nerve-wracking,

so it's very nice to be reassured by that green.

-I'm glad to hear it, because I've got a map to show you - a new Tube map with a new line.

-Oh.

It's called the Crane line, and it runs across London.

The colour I chose for my line is green, the reassuring colour.

-I'd like to think of it as apple green. What do you think?

-It's wonderful.

Green, as I said, is a reassuring colour. The only problem I have is green is also a recessive colour -

-it doesn't stand out.

-Oh, dear!

-That's a little bit light.

-Should it be hardened up?

Yes, you could sharpen it, make it into a lime green as opposed to apple green.

-I love the route, though. Brilliant.

-Thank you. I'm not bad at routes.

Beck as a whole, marks out of ten for the colours he chose on his Tube map?

Oh, I think 12 out of 10. He was brilliant. He did it all by instinct.

I'm going to come clean. I've got a problem with Beck's map.

When I'm in the mountains, I have a watch, a compass, and a map.

I know exactly when I'm going to arrive, even in mist or darkness.

The trouble is, Beck's map has no scale, no measurements.

Once you're underground, you've no idea if you're journey's going to take two minutes or ten minutes.

For people like me, used to using real maps, that's unnerving, a bit like getting lost.

I sometimes suspect it's not worth taking the Tube.

I'm going to conduct an experiment to see how far apart stations really are,

and how long the Tube rides take.

Transport For London have kindly let me sit in the cab of a Piccadilly line train.

I'm going to compare the distances between two stations in Central London and two in the suburbs.

'Mind the gap.'

My first journey was Leicester Square to Covent Garden - 1 minute 40 seconds.

It cost me £1.60.

It's 25 to. I'm going to time how many minutes it takes me to walk back to Leicester Square.

Got there.

3 minutes 10 seconds - pointless taking the Tube.

Now for journey two - Arnos Grove to Southgate.

Three minutes.

The gap between Arnos Grove and Southgate

looks the same as the distance between Covent Garden and Leicester Square, but it isn't.

The reality is that the distance between Leicester Square and Covent Garden is only a few hundred yards.

Arnos Grove to Southgate is over two miles -

-even

-I

-would be pushed to walk that in three minutes,

so for this journey, the Tube is fantastically quick.

As for the map, it's obviously deceptive.

If this was an accurate measured map, the stations would be based proportionately, but they're not.

In reality, some of the stations are quite a long way apart.

Beck had to compress his distances in order to fit the stations onto the map.

But there's another reason for doing that.

In the 1920s and '30s, there was a concerted effort

to entice people away from the cramped confines of inner London to the tree-lined suburbs.

By making people think they were closer to Central London than they were,

the Beck map helped in the propaganda, and it worked.

Half a million people moved in those two decades, and new communities grew up around the new stations.

Much of the appeal lay in the names of these places.

Turnpike Lane,

Arnos Grove.

Names are hugely evocative and sometimes puzzling.

Some of them call up urban squalor. Morden's always sounded the pits to me. Others sound rather idyllic.

Northweald, Golders Green, Chalk Farm, where I live.

You can almost hear the beech woods and the birds.

Unfortunately, there's never been a farm at Chalk Farm - they're all urban fantasies.

To my mind, one of the extraordinary things about Beck's map is it has the power to make names vanish.

Places where thousands of people caught their trains disappear, as happened to Aldwych in 1992.

The trains no longer stop and it's become a ghost station.

So what's left when the name leaves the map?

Here we are, Aldwych Station.

If something's missing from the map, it's usually for one of two reasons.

Either it's a secret and people don't want you to know it's there

or it's because it's ceased to be important - you simply don't need to know about it.

This place is a bit eerie.

The station hasn't been open for ten years. Nowadays they use it for, well, horror movies.

Question - if all the names on Beck's map were changed,

would it still look and feel like Beck?

Simon Patterson's Great Bear did just that.

Conceived in 1992, this is Beck made into art.

Look once, and you think, "It's a Tube map." Look again, and you see every station name is different.

It was about causing people to double-take on something that was very familiar

and had become, in some respects, commonplace or slightly ignored,

except by aficionados of Beck's design.

Did you have a method behind renaming all of these stations?

I notice that I live in Jane Fonda, which is a nice thought.

Each line would be categorised - the Bakerloo line would become engineers,

the Circle line, yellow line, would become philosophers all going round in a circle or having an argument.

I thought it was easier to not put them in any specific order,

because that proved to be as impossible as placing the names on the rest of the map in the end.

-How would you rate Beck's map as a starting point for your own work?

-I think it's a masterpiece,

unsurpassed, really. But when I started making my version,

as I unpicked the work, I saw how beautifully it had been constructed.

What were the elements of Beck's map that you found to be so perfect?

Um, I think it's partly the way that it's infinitely flexible.

It's something that you can remove lines or add lines, it can be extended,

but it isn't a true representation of place -

it's a complete design solution for how to get to A to B,

and also in the clearest possible way.

On today's Tube map, there's a line at the bottom that reads,

"This diagram is an evolution of the original design conceived in 1931 by Harry Beck."

The map had been Beck's brainchild. It had welled up inside him.

As he continually adapted it, he must've thought of it as his own.

Beck himself was a perfectionist.

Between 1931 and 1959,

he spent his evenings making over 19 maps,

drawn up in this house in West Finchley. His home was littered with sketches and incomplete drafts.

His long-suffering wife, Laura, used to find drawings in their bedclothes.

Harry Beck never had a contract with London Underground.

He'd always believed there'd been a gentleman's agreement

that any changes to his map would be his responsibility.

From 1960, however, Beck found himself more and more excluded.

Out in the cold, he continued to send in refinements to his map, but they weren't welcome.

Before it opened, he drew the route of the new Victoria line. That was rejected.

Brilliant ideas are like gold dust. He must've felt cheated.

He gave his life to the map, never earning more than the five guineas he received for his original sketch.

When the map was taken away, a little bit of his soul went with it.

For all his disappointment, though, the current map is clearly a continuation of Beck's work,

and his design principles have had an international impact.

The great cities of the world wouldn't be complete without their underground networks,

and nearly all of their accompanying maps owe something to Beck,

but have any of these other underground maps got a single feature better than Beck's original?

I'm off to meet someone who, believe it or not, is an expert on international subway planners.

Almost all of them have tried the diagrammatic format.

Many of those have used the 45 degree angle

and the perpendicular right angles that Beck brought into use in 1933,

-so his influence has gone round the world.

-What about New York? They had a go, and it didn't work.

Well, the New Yorkers had a fantastic attempt at this in 1972

when a guy called Massimo Vignelli came up with this idea, which was to use all the Beck principles -

45 degree angles, horizontal and vertical lines for every line,

but, strangely, after a few years, the New Yorkers rejected it.

New Yorkers couldn't handle Beck. What about the Parisians?

Paris is a great case - Harry Beck himself came up with his own version of the Metro, and they rejected it.

The Paris Metro, before that, the map was really quite messy.

The names were printed over the lines, making it difficult to read.

In the last couple of years, they've come up with this new version, which has used the Beck principles.

You have the 45 degree angles, clear markers all the way through.

None of the station names clash over the top of the lines

and all the lines are horizontal or vertical, and it is a much more easier map to use.

The French have finally come round to the Beck template. Is there any way of improving on Beck's map?

The most interesting one is what they did in Moscow, where they tried to emphasise the central area,

and, um, on the edges of town, they've used what's been called "beading" of the stations.

They've replaced the lines between the stations with dots -

people presumably know where they are if they live in the suburbs,

but for tourists, this central area has been blown up and it's clearer to use.

-That is beautiful. It's perfectly balanced.

-I love this one.

It's one of my favourite maps from all over the world. In some ways, it's an improvement on Beck.

MUSIC: "Down In The Tube Station At Midnight" by The Jam

Overground London is a sprawling mass of streets and buildings.

But Beck's Underground map has made London look streamlined and elegant.

It's one of the capital's great images, alongside Buckingham Palace, Big Ben, and now the London Eye,

but more than that, it's made travelling in London easy,

and in 70 years, no-one has made any serious attempt to replace it.

For all the carping about distorted geography, no timings or distances,

everybody seems to want Beck's map to stay.

The truth, I suspect, is travellers regard the simplicity of the map

to be a relief from the city's complicated surface geography.

The Underground is a sanctuary, and Mr Beck's incredible map brings order from chaos.

Now, I'm going home to Chalk Farm straight up the Northern line.

Subtitles by Peter Hastie BBC Broadcast 2004

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