Atlas of Imaginary Places 11: 'Tube Maps'

As previewed in the previous posting, this one is looking at alternate London Underground maps. I have featured some like 'The Great Bear' and the Gallifrey one in August 2007. This posting has some more including a more thorough German translation one rather than the semi-English/semi-German one I have shown before, though I like the counter-factual implications of that one.


This is the one that got me started, a postcard from the city of Bath in western England. Given that the city is over 2000 years old, it seems odd that they portray it in this modern way. This postcard makes it seem a lot larger than it actually is. It is a very picturesque place with Georgian architecture and extensive Roman remains. One could easily envisage a Bath Below given how much stuff is buried there going back so many centuries. Maybe Neil Gaiman will consider it.

City of Bath 'Underground' Map

I have removed this image as a result of a copyright challenge.

Having seen this, I wondered if other cities had done the same. There were a few from US cities but nothing which leapt out and instead I began encountering the underground map used in different ways. Before progressing, I will show the earliest version from Henry Beck in 1931 which actually shows how much it has progressed. The style today actually looks more 1960s with 1980s overtones than anything from the 1930s despite the emphasis on continuity.

London Underground Map by Henry Beck

This one was designed for a book called 'Transit Maps of the World' (2007) by Mike Oveden and gives some indications of airline links across the world.

To some extent it is rather like those maps which show contries by the magnitude of something that they are involved in such as consumption of electricity and you see that Spain and Portugal for example are portrayed about a third of the size of the whole of Africa and similarly the Middle East is extended, in both cases reflecting the amount of airline traffic iin comparison to the geographical sizes of these regions

London Underground Map in German

This is the promised one more properly rendering the stations into German. Though this then makes it appear more like just a tourist tool than the implications of a collaborationist regime in the style of 'SS-GB' or perhaps 'When William Came' suggested by the less thorough one I have shown before. I guess for all British people showing familiar things in German still has echoes because even the current generation often defines itself in reference to being opposed to anything German despite the fact that most grandparents were only children when the last war against Germany finished.

Now, I move away from the geographical to the intellectual. The London Underground styling is often used almost like a mindmap to illustrate in a somehow tangible way things which are really intangible. The simplest one I have found is this one which almost seems to be axes of taste in culture:

Understated Tube Mind-Map

This one is reminiscent of those maps that look like ones of fantasy worlds but in fact show groupings and developments on the internet. This one shows what are seen as current trends in global society and how they inter-relate to people. It has Chinese characters, which in itself can be seen as a trend, but may also hint at a source. It is interesting that whoever it came from is less imbued with the fantasy map background and clearly is more familiar with the portrayal of actual cities. Perhaps by adopting this style they felt it would gain more credibility than a fantasy-style map. Looking at it, it does not resemble the London Undeground map but one of the maps from other cities like the Paris Metro system or most likely a system in Beijing or Shanghai.

Trend Blend Urban Transport Style Map (2008)

The following one is similar but again focused purely on the internet and seems closer to the London Underground mapping. I do wonder if in 2008 that this style is seen as cool and serious compared to the fantasy world map style of the past few years that were used to illustrate such things.

Web Trend Map (2008)

Rather than go with one of the numerous music style maps which I know less about, though I may come back to them in the future, I was attracted to this one from the Royal Shakespeare Company. It is reminiscent of 'The Great Bear' and that might be indicated by the title they have adopted. It features Shakespeare characters and the mapping to some extent shows the relationships between them. I must say this is one of my favourites and it goes beyond the simply conceptual basis. I also like the little icons next to some of the 'stations' too. I would love it if the underground stations were labelled by Shakespeare characters. Given that the main point of access for millions of people each year to poetry is simply by the Poems On The Underground scheme which started in 1986 (it means poems are put up in advertising slots in underground train carriages), then why should not more of their journey be influenced by literature?

Greater Shakespeare Underground Map

This final one is just a comic one, substituting various foods ('grub' is an old UK slang term for food) for the underground stations. I do wonder why Transport For London went after the Geoff Marshall one and not this one which in my mind could appear more insulting, though in fact I feel they are all delightful and bring attention and respect to the London Underground system and its iconography.

Undergrub Map

The Black Riders of the Internet III: Not Going Underground

This posting spins off from me doing one of my intermittent searches of the internet for interesting maps. As you will know I do not do this as assiduously as bloggers such as Strange Maps but it does give me pleasure to collect together interesting samples in this kind of scrapbook of a blog that I run. Having seen a postcard from Bath which portrayed that city as if it was the London Underground system I went in search of other locations which might have done this. Back in August 2007 if you look on my 'Atlas of Imaginary Worlds 5' posting you will see a couple of examples, including the underground map being used as a piece of art work, 'The Great Bear' produced in 1992. Since then lots of people have used the structure of the map for highlighting various things and I will show some examples in the posting which follows this one. However, this posting is about what else that I found out. As with many issues I came to this a couple of years late. It is about internet censorship, something else I posted on twice last August with two postings titled 'The Black Riders of the Internet' which detailed how lawyers are rampaging around the internet especially looking for maps of the world of 'The Lord of the Rings' and shutting down websites which feature them. These sites are run by fans not by profit-making organisations; no-one was trying to sell these maps. Yet, for the lawyers they would rather squash the enthusiasm of fans in an incredibly heavy-handed way and no doubt for a fat fee, so actually damaging rather than aiding the Tolkien estate.


I encountered the same thing when I was looking at maps which borrow from the London Underground map. Loads of people do this there are ones, in particular, featuring different music genres. Yet lawyers, Healeys Solicitors, on behalf of Transport For London the body which now runs the London Underground targeted one of these. The man they targeted was Geoff Marshall who just like 'The Great Bear' by Simon Patterson, took the map and simply altered the labels for each of the stations. What was clever, as you can see below, is that he made anagrams of the original station names. This in itself must have taken ages especially to come up with so many coherent names. Geoff was a real fan on the underground system and an advocate of its usage. However, the pressure from the solicitors back in March 2006 led him to turn completely around and now he drives everywhere in London. Many organisations face spoofs of their advertisements, I recently featured a whole slew of them around Absolut vodka's advertising, many of which were pretty offensive. In contrast Geoff was just producing art work based on something he loved. Of course in contemporary UK to go against the desires of the rich even to produce art is now illegal. Corporations seek to control every minute element and by doing so are stamping on our contemporary culture. What would have happened if Andy Warhol had been censored by soup manufacturers or by Chairman Mao or Marilyn Monroe?


Anyway, below is the excellent picture, please copy it and spread it so far around the internet that we can contest the censorship which is going on. There are so many evil things on the internet, including images, that no-one lifts a finger to stop, that it seems criminal that instead they spend so much effort to crush enthusiasts and fans and artists. If you are interested in others visit:

http://ni.chol.as/media/sillytube.html or http://www.steveprentice.net/tube/TfLSillyMaps/

In fact many featured there are not silly and show things such as stations with wheelchair user access and where the toilets are, which as someone who used to travel 2 hours per day on the underground, I know can be vital.

Anagram Map by Geoff Marshall (2006)