Posts Tagged ‘tube’

There’s More Underneath London Than Just Trains

Oh yes, look. Gary’s written yet another post about a map of the London Tube system that he likes. Yawn. Time to move on. But wait … this may look like a map of the London Underground but it’s not.

Now I may have been guilty of wearing my heart on my sleeve slightly too much where variations on a theme of the London Underground map have been concerned; there’s at least seven posts on this topic already posted.

Granted, there’s the Northern Line on the map; but this is more for a sense of geographical perspective than anything else.

The blue lines aren’t branches of the Piccadilly Line. They’re the rivers that have been long lost and yet still run under the streets of London; the Fleet, the Effra, the Westbourne and Stamford Brook. Historical point of note; the Jubilee Line was originally going to be called the Fleet Line, although the path of the line followed the course of the (also buried) Tyburn rather than the Fleet, but was renamed the Jubilee to coincide with the Silver Jubilee of Elizabeth II.

Likewise, the orange lines aren’t the Overground, they’re sewers, nor is the red line the Central Line, it’s the Post Office railway or Mail Rail.

So it may look like a map of the Tube, but it’s anything but. It’s all the work of Richard Fairhurst, who’s made a few maps in his time; they’re well worth a look.

Written and posted from home (51.427051, -0.333344)

Lodged Donor Nun Run; The Anagram Map Of The London Underground

If you think you know the map of the London Underground network think again. You probably think the Metropolitan Line runs between Amersham and Aldgate; but on this map it doesnt. Instead, it runs between Ram Shame and Data Gel. The southwest termini for the District Line are Richmond and Wimbledon. Maybe not. According to this map, Inch Dorm and Bowel Mind are the end of the line. It’s good to know I used to live near Foldaway Rhumba rather than Fulham Broadway, that Nokia’s central London office is just by Apt Nodding and I feel sorry for someone who lives near Lancaster Gate, sorry, I mean Castrate Angel.

It’s amazing what you get when you make anagrams out of each and every station on the Tube network.

Written and posted from home (51.427051, -0.333344)

Re-imagining The London Tube Map With Curves And Circles

Another day, another map and another #mapgasm post. Actually another 2 maps, both of which are by Max Roberts and both of which have appeared on Annie Mole’s Going Underground blog.

Continuing my fascination with the map of the London Underground, which I may have posted about before, Max has been wondering what the Tube Map would look like if it was all curved.

Or maybe, just maybe what it would be like if the Tube Map was circular, in the most literal of fashions.

I wonder what Harry Beck would think of these re-imaginings of his iconic map; I think he’d probably approve.

Photo Credits: Max Roberts and Annie Mole on Flickr.

Written and posted from home (51.427051, -0.333344)

Of W3G, AGI And Other Geographical Acronyms

In November 2008 I was still working for Yahoo and a fledgling meetup event for people interested in maps, location, geo and mobile started up in London. It was, and still is, called GeoMob. I was at GeoMob’s very first event, talking about Yahoo’s Fire Eagle location brokering platform. Four years later and it was great to go back, see GeoMob still flourishing despite a brief hiatus in 2010, and meet up with a lot of old friends as well as meet some new ones.

And what an evening it was. Truly a veritable feast of maps. David Overton spoke about SplashMaps, his Kickstarter funded project to produce lightweight printable fabric maps for outdoors.

I didn’t think it was possible to map happiness but apparently it is and George MacKerron showed how with the aptly entitled Mappiness project.

Staying with tangible maps, Anna Butler from Wellingtons Travel wowed the audience with her lovingly hand drawn map of the centre of London, styled after the glorious illustrated maps of yesteryear. Almost all the audience immediately added a copy of her map to their Christmas lists en masse.

And then there was James Cheshire who, along with Ollie O’Brien, runs Spatial Analysis and they’d produced Lives On The Line, a map of the life expectancy of Londoners along the path of the London Underground lines. Not only maps, but Tube maps. What more can you want?

Finally, standing between the audience and a thirst quenching GeoBeer or two, it was my turn. This wasn’t my usual talk. No mapporn. Not even that many pithy or wryly amusing images. Just some raising of awareness for the W3G conference and the AGI. As usual, the slide deck is below and the notes follow after the break.

View this document on Scribd

Read On…

The London Tube Map Made (Too) Simple

This is post number six in the ongoing #mapgasm series of posts on maps found on the interwebs that I like. Yes, it’s another map. Yes, it’s another Tube map. I make no apologies for this.

A simple map is often a good map. Cutting away cartographical clutter can reveal the heart of what a map is trying to show. But sometimes you can maybe take the map pruning just a little bit too far. Take the map of the London Underground; surely one of the simplest and more effective maps there is. Surely there’s not much scope for making it any simpler?

So Hugh Grant is Notting Hill Gate. Dinosaurs is South Kensington. France is King’s Cross St. Pancras and Wax Celebs is Baker Street. But the meaning of XXL eludes me. What is it at Waterloo or Southwark stations that justifies the Extra Extra Large tag?

A tip of the hat goes to Jonathan Raper for spotting this in Adam Lilley’s Tweet-stream.

Written and posted from home (51.427051, -0.333344)

Map Nature Or Map Nurture; Are Map Addicts Born Or Made?

I’ve said it before, many times, but I’m a 100% un-reconstructed map addict and make no apology for it. I’ve said this in posts I’ve written on this blog as well as using it as part of my introduction for talks at conferences. This post is a slightly more long winded version of why I am the map addict that I am.

I grew up in the suburbs of London. For as long as I can remember, every week day morning my father picked up his briefcase and walked to the local British Rail station (for this was way before the privatisation of the British rail network) and went to the fantastical place, to a child’s mind at least, called Central London where he worked. He went there on a train. Which was amazing and wonderful to me at the time. I knew he worked in Central London because he had a book of maps of all the streets in Central London. It was old, dog-eared and probably out of date but it made the journey to and from work with him every day and I used to look at it in the evenings, after he’d come home for the day. This mystical and wondrous book was called the London A-Z. It looked something like this.

But what was even more wondrous was that this book of street maps had another map on it. The back cover showed a map of railways which ran under the ground, in tunnels. If trains were amazing and wonderful to me then, trains which ran under the ground in tunnels were a complete revelation to me. This other map, of the trains in tunnels, looked something like this.

I didn’t know about Harry Beck or the history of the London Underground Tube map. All I knew was that this was something almost other-wordly. I fell in love with that map when I was around 7 years of age and I’ve not fallen out of love with it yet (as posts on this blog probably show).

So my father inadvertently introduced me to maps. So obviously a map addict is down to personal experience. It was my father’s London A-Z that made me a map addict. It’s nurture not nature.

Maybe not …

Last weekend I was sorting through a load of boxes that has been in storage since my father passed away. As I’d expected it was a massive lump in the throat affair as I came across things I remember from childhood. Also as expected, I found a whole lot of stuff which I’d never seen before and which, to a small degree, made the knowledge that I had of my father just that little bit more complete. But also, totally unexpected, I found this, from 1939.

Then I found this from 1943.

Now I’m not suggesting for one moment that my father was also a fellow map addict but he’d kept these for over 70 years in his possession so maybe, just maybe, maps meant something to him too.

Maybe, just maybe, there’s some nature at work in the creation of a map addict as was as some nurture. Just maybe.

Written and posted from home (51.427051, -0.333344)

The Map Of The World According To The London Underground

Yes, it’s another map. Yes, it’s another map of the London Tube system. But wait … something’s not quite right.

Surely the Piccadilly Line ends at Uxbridge, Heathrow Airport and Cockfosters and not at Seattle, Buenos Aires and St. Petersburg? Doesn’t the Northern Line run from Edgeware and High Barnet to Morden and not from Helsinki to Mumbai?

Maybe if the London Underground did take over the world, including 3 tunnels across the Atlantic Ocean, this is what the Tube Map might look like.

Photo Credits: Annie Mole on Flickr.

Written and posted from home (51.427051, -0.333344)

The Olympic Tube Map

Not all maps are created equal. I’ve always had a soft spot for maps of the London Underground network ever since I saw one on the back of an old London A-Z street map far too many years ago.

In case you hadn’t noticed, London hosted the 2012 Olympic Games a few weeks ago so what could be more natural than a map of the Tube with famous Olympic athletes in the place of the more familiar and geographically correct station names. Maybe Chris Boardman instead of Swiss Cottage, Victoria Pendleton instead of St. John’s Wood or Daley Thompson in place of Baker Street?

Hop over to the Transport for London web site and for between £3.99 and £49.00, the Olympic Legends Tube Map can be yours. I certainly want one. Huge amounts of kudos go to my darling wife for spotting this in the first place.

Written and posted from the Arcotel Velvet, Oranienburger Straße, Berlin (52.52602, 13.38834)

Making Maps Underground

Warning. This post contains a sweeping generalisation. Yes, I know that Places are not just part of today’s digital maps; see the James Fee and Tyler Bell hangout The One Where Tyler Bell Defines Big Data as a proof point. But for the sake of this post, just assume that Places and maps are synonymous.

It’s never been easier to make a map. Correction. It’s never been easier to contribute to a map. Today we seem to be ~~making~~contributing to maps everywhere, even underground, or should I say Underground?

To ~~make~~contribute to a map, you used to have to be a professional map maker, with easy access to an arsenal of surveying or an industrial grade GPS.

Then came the notion of community mapping. Be it OpenStreetMap, Navteq’s and Nokia’s Map Creator or Google’s Map Maker, anyone armed with a GPS enabled smartphone, hell, anyone without a GPS, could help make a map.

And now it seems, all you need to do to help make a map is to be somewhere unmapped with some form of internet access, be it a 3G or 4G cellular data connection, or a wifi connection. As part of the London 2012 Olympic Games, some London Underground stations (finally) got wifi access and sure enough, where wifi goes, so does mapping, even platforms on the London Underground.

With apologies to Steve Karmeinsky for exposing part of his Foursquare check-in history.

Written and posted from the Arcotel Velvet, Oranienburger Straße, Berlin (52.52602, 13.38834)

Mapping The Might Have Been

The moment you make a map there’s a fairly good chance that it will be out of date. There’s nothing wrong with this; anyone who works in the cartography or mapping fields will tell you that one of the biggest challenges in making maps is not making the map, it’s keeping it up to date once it’s made. Geography is constantly moving, changing, flowing thing.

One of the most fascinating aspects of old maps is not so much looking at what’s changed since they were made, though that is fascinating enough, but of what might have been but then never was.

Regular readers of this blog may have worked out that out of all the maps there are, my favourite is the London Underground Tube map. A browse through the London Tube Map Archive shows just how much the Tube network has expanded and contracted over the years and how stations have changed not only in name but sometimes in position as well. But some of these maps also show what was planned but which was never realised; as Trent Reznor once put it “all the what abouts, the might have and could have beens“. Take a look at this map of the network from 1938.

The lines marked under contruction are part of what was called the New Works Programme and some of them that are shown on the map did get built. The eastern and western Central Line extensions were completed, though only as far as West Ruislip in the east and not to Denham as planned. The extension of the Bakerloo line from Baker Street to Stanmore was also built and now forms part of today’s Jubilee Line. But the Northern Heights Plan, the criss cross of lines branching off from the Northern Line never reached completion. The extension north of Edgware, the link between Edgware and Mill Hill East to Finchley and the extension to Alexandra Palace from Finsbury Park via Highgate were all finally dropped in 1954.

There’s a strange parallel between 1939′s Tube map and one produced by Transport For London in 2004, showing how the map would look in 2016. A scaled down version of Crossrail is currently being tunneled underneath central London, but there’s no sign yet of the Cross River Transit linking Brixton and Peckham with Camden, nor is there any sign of the West London Transit linking Shepherds Bush with Uxbridge via Ealing Broadway. Heathrow Terminal 5 on the Piccadilly Line was built and now links to Paddington but as part of the Heathrow Express and not Crossrail and there’s no sign of the Metropolitan Line linking Watford and Watford Junction.

As a closing note which will probably be only of interest to my Teddington readers (Hi Ed !!), a branch of Crossrail was also planned to start at Kingston and link with the main Crossrail route somewhere west of today’s Ladbroke Grove station, taking in Teddington, Twickenham and Richmond along the way. In the light of today’s spending cuts and economic climate, it sadly looks like the scope of the network envisaged back in 2004 will never be fully realised, consigning 2004′s map of the Underground network to the same level of historical curiosity that 1938′s map has today.

Map Credits: London Reconnections and The London Tube Map Archive.

Written and posted from home (51.427051, -0.333344)

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