MyTube

Your best friend in London will be a tube map. Guaranteed. Designed in 1933 by draughtsman Harry Beck, it is was revolution in spatial design. Of course as with anything fresh, and innovative, it was instantly rejected by officials. Ol’ Harry must have known that he was onto something good though, because he sat on it for a year before resubmitting the identical design. This time it was adopted, so much so that it grew wings and soared, not only in London, but it took off in New York and Sydney, where his designs were plagiarised and still used today.

Other maps have been produced. The Heritage and Transportation webring has a great history of tube maps as they’ve developed in the past century. For contemporary use, you can purchase walking maps, which show connections between stations which are a short walk apart. While Beck’s schematic map is simple enough even for American tourists to navigate through, it obviously doesn’t give a true representation of the geography. For that, you need to check out the alternative tube map, a scale overlay of the tube’s colour-coded design. You could even opt for the ultra-pedantic Way Out map, a design which shows every station exit, and even tells the traveller which carriage will bring them closest to the exit.

There’s more, much more. For the lunatics, you can visit Animals on the Underground, where you can buy, well animals made from the schematic. I really don’t want to go on; it’s as inane as it sounds.

But by far the most fantastic layout I’ve seen to date is the Google Map-esq layout, from nyclondon (who, since I read the page properly, covers many of the links above). It’s a high-res satellite photo of London with tube lines overlaid. I could knock it a little and point out that the Jubilee line gets muddied into the background, and the DLR is all but non-existent, but it will do little to sally what is essentially a work of art.