Mapping the design history of the underground

A new exhibition at The Map House is giving visitors the chance to explore the evolution of London’s Tube system and the iconic London Underground map over 160 years, as well as a rare opportunity to see and purchase hand-drawn and annotated manuscripts by Harry Beck on the 50th anniversary of his death.

Beck’s 1933 pocket map influenced the design of transport maps worldwide and is an instantly recognisable design icon. The exhibition, Mapping the Tube: 1863-2023, will include the most significant collection of his manuscripts ever offered for sale.

For decades, The Map House has been collecting and selling Tube maps, but the idea for this exhibition came about when the team acquired a unique collection of Beck’s work. According to exhibition curator Charles Roberts, the annotated maps were originally in the possession of Beck’s friend and biographer, Ken Garland, and some are even illustrated in his excellent biography of Beck.

Since the maps had never been publicly exhibited, The Map House wanted to display them for the first time and use them to tell the complete story of the Tube map from 1863 to today. “Some of the material in the collection has been kept aside for over a decade with an exhibition like this in mind, but it was only when we acquired the Beck drawings that we felt the collection was ready to be shown to the public,” says Roberts.

He reveals that some of the maps in the exhibition are exceedingly rare, including Beck’s 1933 station poster, of which fewer than ten surviving examples are known to exist.

While the exhibition is generally chronological, The Map House was slightly limited by the size and shape of the gallery. The reception gallery, which is the first you’ll see upon entry, is decorated primarily with pre-Harry Beck maps, including MacDonald Gill’s ‘Wonderground Map’, a 1904 ‘Statist Magazine’ map aimed at encouraging private investment in the Underground
scheme, and an 1887 Jubilee Edition of the ‘District Railway Map of London’.

A short flight of stairs then takes you to the mezzanine level, where two large Harry Beck maps are displayed: a 1936 Double-Crown poster and a 1946 Quad Foolscap poster, both extremely rare. A 1935 poster by the husband-and-wife team Clifford & Rosemary Ellis also sits in this space. It was originally created to advertise Christmas shopping by Tube in Knightsbridge, Kensington, and Sloane Square. Next to this is a very unusual bus map of London published in 1934 and overprinted with an advert for the Cinderella pantomime at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane.

The Mews Gallery houses the core of the collection and three of the most important maps in the exhibition, all by Harry Beck: a unique 1932 draft with annotations by Harry Beck and his predecessor, Fred Stingemore; the first official Harry Beck Tube map (printed in January 1933); and Beck’s first Double-Crown poster (printed in August 1933 with fewer than ten surviving examples known).

On another wall are four other Harry Beck manuscript maps, each a unique map with no other known examples. The opposite wall is then completely covered by a grid of 45 framed Tube maps, showing the complete evolution of the map from Beck’s first 1933 design to the present day.

Roberts says: “We have one example from every year a map was published between 1933 and 1975, along with one map from each decade representing the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2010s, and 2020s.

“At the end of this grid is Max Roberts’s remarkable Circular Tube Map, updated to August 2024 with the renamed Overground lines.”

Roberts describes the collection of sketches and annotated designs created by Harry Beck at the heart of the exhibition as “one-of-a-kind treasures” from Beck’s personal archive.

“For the right collector, this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” he says, noting that one of the maps is an annotated draft for the fir