
A History of the London Tube Maps - muon
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/clivebillson/tube/tube.html
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RiderOfGiraffes
Shades of Tufte and The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. The
outstanding change between 1932 and 1933 was the discarding of the irrelevant
exact layout of the lines, and using instead the simplest possible topological
layout. By no longer showing the physical distances between stations, or the
exact weaving in and out of the lines, Harry Beck's layout is the basis of
most modern underground railway maps.

For the time it was an astonishing leap of representation, regarded with great
suspicion.

Before:
[http://homepage.ntlworld.com/clivebillson/tube/tube.html#193...](http://homepage.ntlworld.com/clivebillson/tube/tube.html#1932)

After:
[http://homepage.ntlworld.com/clivebillson/tube/tube.html#193...](http://homepage.ntlworld.com/clivebillson/tube/tube.html#1933)

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Luc
As much as I love the qualities of the new map, the old one DOES convey useful
extra information, especially now we've become sufficiently acquainted with
the modern one. I would like to see an updated old-style map, it would be a
nice (retrograde) evolution.

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RiderOfGiraffes
The "SnapMap" of London shows the actual routes of the lines and the locations
of the stations on a simplistic, but accurate enough, map of London. I use
mine all the time.

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Luc
Thanks for the tip, not quite what I had in mind but looks pretty useful.

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jrnkntl
Why are the links the same color as the text and not even underlined? What if
all the tubes had the same color on his map?

