We went to see the exhibition of Tube Diagrams featuring some very early sketches by Harry Beck at the Map House in Knightsbridge (very, very pricey).
Victoria Line at Kings Cross and Euston
Four unique sketches in Harry Beck’s hand showing different ways to depict the area around Kings Cross and Euston when the Victoria Line was added to the diagram.
These sketches, drawn between 1961 and 1964, after Beck was unceremoniously ousted by London Transport, show his continued obsession with the design.
The first sketch (top-left) employs a design element which Beck had never used before: a square symbol for a mainline station interchange. As Beck never included this device on any of his other maps, we can suppose that he did not like this solution.
The second sketch (top-right) uses a bend in the Circle and Metropolitan Lines at King’s Cross to allow for a tidier connection with the Victoria Line. This ‘hump’ reduces the number of interchange circles to two, allowing for a much tighter diagram. Here Beck uses capitalized station names to indicate an interchange with British Railways services instead of the square icon. Beck had never been permitted to mix upper-case and lower-case station names prior to 1960.
The third sketch (bottom-left) shows King’s Cross with four interchange circles and Euston with three. Beck’s use of coloured circles to indicate which lines intersect dates back to his first map of 1933, but this tradition had been axed by Beck’s replacement who favoured one black circle or square to indicate an interchange. This sketch includes one other unique design element – the curved line connecting the two branches of the northern line between Mornington Crescent and Euston.
The fourth sketch (bottom-right) is an outlier, showing much of the eastern Circle Line, and parts of the Central and Piccadilly Lines. Here Harry Beck grapples with two problems: the route of the Victoria Line and how it might affect the eastern curve of the Circle Line. This sketch proposes a solution which never appears on a finished map, but was inspired by Paul Garbutt’s bottle-shaped Circle Line.
This remarkable set of sketches show the evolution of Harry Beck’s thinking about the addition of the Victoria Line and his continuing effort to improve the design after 1960.
