"Christie's is set to auction off a rare 1932 draft of the Tube map created by Harry Beck, an Essex-born electrical draughtsman. It features hand-written annotations from Beck and Frederick Stingemore, who designed London Underground maps produced between 1926-1932. Beck created the map while unemployed, shortly after he was laid off by the Underground Electric Railways Company of London. While initially considered radical, his pioneering approach to the sprawling network set a benchmark for every Tube map officially circulated since."
"Before 1932, maps of the Tube had been printed and circulated, but Beck's effort marked the first 'diagrammatic' one that was not geographically accurate. He'd noticed that geographic maps had meant a lot of detail was bunched together and hard to read - an increasing problem as the Tube expanded. He made the famous network easier to understand by using only straight lines and 45 degree angles, making use of space for a more digestible layout."
Christie's will auction a rare 1932 draft of the Tube map created by Harry Beck. The draft contains handwritten annotations by Beck and Frederick Stingemore, who designed London Underground maps between 1926 and 1932. Beck created the map while unemployed after being laid off by the Underground Electric Railways Company of London. He abandoned geographic scale and accuracy, favoring straight lines and 45 degree angles to declutter the network and improve readability. His electrical-draughtsmanship experience produced a diagrammatic, circuit-like layout. The approach established the blueprint used for official Tube maps thereafter, and the reworked public map followed in 1933.
Read at Mail Online
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