‘Garbage’ London Underground map gets circular redesign

University lecturer’s alternative design goes viral online as he says current version is ‘lamentable for all sorts of reason’

The London Underground map has been redrawn in a “circles and spokes” design by a university lecturer who called the official map “garbage”.
Maxwell Roberts, who posted a picture of his alternative design online, said he was surprised after it went viral, receiving a million engagements within 24 hours.
His version uses circles to represent the various Tube lines, differing from the straight lines used in Harry Beck’s 1933 Tube map, which is used by Transport for London (TfL).
Mr Roberts, from Walton-on-the-Naze, who has lectured in psychology at the University of Essex for 30 years, said the 90-year-old map was not effective.
“The current state of the official London Underground map is lamentable for all sorts of reasons,” he wrote on LinkedIn.
“It has poor balance, simplicity, coherence and topographical accuracy.
“It fails by any criterion of effectiveness you can imagine and has been in a neglected state of decline for years.
“I caused a stir a few years ago calling it a ‘garbage piece of lazy design’ and nothing has happened since to change my mind.”
He first redesigned the map in a circular way in 2013, when he placed Tottenham Court Road at the centre and built his map around the station.
After leaving the map untouched for a decade, he chose to redesign it after TfL released its own “circles” version earlier this year.
When he approached it again, he placed Oxford Circus at the centre and said he was happier with the result.
He said: “This time, I tried Oxford Circus as the geometric centre, permitting some nice symmetry inside the Circle Line…
“Overall, I am very happy with the result. I think I’ve achieved my objectives and, placed next to my original, the earlier map looks a bit clunky and naive.”
But Mr Walton, whose variations on the Tube map also include a “Curvymap”, said he saw his work as an “exploration”.
“If I publish a design, this does not necessarily mean that I think it is the correct way to map a city,” he said.
“In fact, this would be impossible. I have mapped London in so many different ways over the years and my designs can’t all be correct.
“Instead, I see my work as exploration, and I publish the results so that people can see what I have attempted and can evaluate the outcomes for themselves.”
Found on the walls of Tube stations across London, the official map of the Underground is a familiar site.
The maze of coloured lines which interweave and overlap was designed in 1933 by Harry Beck, a designer and technical draftsman who developed it after being fired from the London Metro Signal Office.
Before Beck’s design, some maps of the Underground were strictly obedient to the geography of the city, showing scale-accurate distances between stations.
Beck’s masterstroke was ditching geographical accuracy in favour of convenience and ease, with all the stations more-or-less equally spaced. It used only horizontal, vertical and 45º lines, and the Underground lines were represented by a set of standard colours.
Beck’s map has undergone variations over the years, accommodating new lines and stations, but the core of his initial design is still in place.
It has even survived the transition to the digital age, with the TfL Go app, which is now used by many Londoners to navigate the city, still drawing on his design.
A TfL spokesman told the BBC the original map was “an iconic piece of world-renowned design” and there were no plans to change it.
“While there have been some previous ‘circular’ designs of a London Tube map created by fans and other designers over the decades, [the new] design was specifically created in-house by our design team for this campaign and only shows the London Underground lines, external,” the spokesman said.