McConnell takes me through the old process with the old tools – tracing paper, pens with interchangeable nibs to vary the thickness of the line. After hand-lettering there was rub-down lettering: ‘The great skill was in writing round corners, sometimes in italics, having to plan ahead like chess.’
He looks at an old sheet with trams on it, and compares it with a modern one. ‘London has totally been redrawn,’ he says. ‘But what always amuses me most about this is that London’s not really there at all. It’s just the streets and the place names, but London as we know it, the houses and the shops, the people, the soul of the place isn’t there, it’s done away with.’
New editions of the A-Z now appear each year, and on one a few years ago there were more than 10,000 alterations and additions (predominantly minor things like building names and footpaths, but a new development by the docks would easily add 500 entries to the index). The handwriting and Letraset have long gone, of course. A man called Tim Goodfellow curves the road on a computer now, and new streets take seconds rather than days to appear. One small change will digitally reorientate the entire area, recognising which roads have priority in the colour scheme; on the A-Z sat nav, a new road block in the City will automatically recalculate the journey time from the Strand to St Paul’s.
I asked Goodfellow if he was ever tempted to place some personal detail on the map – the name of a loved one, perhaps, easily excused as a way of protecting it from copyright infringement. ‘We do have security roads within each publication,’ he said.’ We refer to them as phantoms. We would just add something and choose a name that’s sympathetic to the area so that it doesn’t look out of place. So if you have an estate where all the side-roads are flowers, we wouldn’t put in a name of a stone.’
‘But you can’t invent whole roads?’
‘You could. If it was a main thoroughfare then that would be wrong, because you’d be misleading, but you can add a small cul de sac. We have people calling up and saying “there isn’t a road there,” and then we tell them why. Often we’ll then move it.’
The whole A to Z of London – complete with the odd phantom diversion – rests in a single file on Goodfellow’s computer. It is driven, nowadays, by French software, supplied by Michelin. We gaze at his large computer screen. Even backlit, even digitised, even French, the map is still a beautiful thing.
Pocket Map
The Biggest Map of All: Beck’s London Tube
In much of his correspondence, and in most photographs, Harry Beck doesn’t seem like he’s one for jokes. He seems more after respect, and perhaps a pay rise, and both would be his due. For it was Beck – an intermittently employed engineering draughtsman – who designed a new map for the London Underground that became one of the most useful items of the twentieth century. In its various forms the map has been printed more than any other map in history – perhaps half a billion times, and rising. Beck got paid a few pounds for it.
The London tube map is a prime example of how a designer can take a problem and simplify it – and inspire its users. It is a schematic and digrammatic map, which triumphs over its geography: in real life the stations are not, of course, all the same distance apart, the centre of London is not as large as it seems in relation to the suburbs, the trains do not travel on straight lines. But its concealments are its strengths, for it’s only a map in the loosest sense. It is really a circuit board of connections and directions with no real-life obstacles in its way. The only part of the city to intrude is the Thames; the rest is a graphic interpretation.
The map has become one of the most durable symbols of London, partly due to its ubiquity and colour-coding, and partly due to its very neat trick of making a sprawling city appear ordered and manageable, in much the same way as the post-Fire engravings of London did in the 1670s. And although Beck never set out to be considered in the same breath as Ortelius and Ogilby (and indeed never considered himself a cartographer at all), he created a map that continues to prove influential worldwide.
What makes it so special? Its clarity, certainly, but also its aesthetic beauty. There were diagrammatic train maps before this – notably those for the London & North Eastern Railway by George Dow – but none that so convincingly combined so many separate lines. There was beauty before it too, not least the typographically luxuriant maps of MacDonald Gill from the 1920s and the curving spaghetti-style interpretation by Fred Stingemore that Londoners had in their pockets the year Beck came on the scene. But Maxwell Roberts, a psychology lecturer and a tube map obsessive (he spends many spare hours designing improved subway maps of the world for his own amusement), has defined some key elements that tend to define all the best maps: simplicity, coherence, balance, harmony and topography, and Beck’s map scores on all but the last. He argues that his map was special not because it used straight lines but because it had so few corners.
But could the genius take a joke? He was, apparently, keen on lampoon and satire, but how far would this stretch? Would he have appreciated the plethora of faux-London tube maps that have appeared in recent years? The most famous of these is Simon Patterson’s The Great Bear from 1992, which now hangs proudly at Tate Britain and in many reproductions at the London Transport Museum shop. Patterson treated the map as pop art, replacing its stations with a witty selection of footballers (the Jubilee line), philosophers (District and Circle Lines) and Hollywood film stars (Northern Line).
The London Underground – before and after Beck’s ‘circuit diagram’ overhaul of its geography.
A more recent take on the same theme is the Daily Mail Moral Underground (not for sale in the London Transport Museum shop but viewable in full on The Poke comedy website), whose lines and stops reflect the apparent fears and obsessions of middle England. The District Line becomes a line of Nuisances, including Twitter, Sat Nav, Student Scum and 24hr Drinking, while the Bakerloo is Medical Scares, including Obesity, Cataracts and Deep Vein Thrombosis. The Northern Line (Arch-Enemies) is worth riding too, for you can alight anywhere between Guardian Readers, Single Mothers, Scroungers, Immigrants and The French.
We will never know where Beck would have told these parodists to get off, for he died in 1974, two decades before the personal computer made mash-ups of his map a possibility and a joy. But there was one that he would have been aware of, a satire that appeared in 1966 on an official London Underground poster designed by Hans Unger. This was a precursor of Patterson’s work, depicting a section of the map as art movements, with stations labelled Op Art and Abstract Expressionism.
Of the maps that came after, some have been genuinely useful, overlaying information rather than disrupting it, including the map that shows which parts of the Underground are actually underground (only about 45 per cent), and the map that explained the distances between stations so that passengers would know if it would be faster to walk (the few hundred yards between Leicester Square and Covent Garden, for example, are almost always quicker on foot).
Then there are the elegant and artistic ones, such as Eiichi Kono’s type map, on which hundreds of popular typefaces are placed upon a line according to their family (Futura and Bell Centennial on the Sans Serif Northern line; Georgia and Walbaum on the Modern District line; Arial and Comic Sans on the Ornamental Overland line). There is Barbara Kruger’s emotional map, with stations named Betrayal, Compassion and Arrogance. Or the translation work of H. Prillinger, who dared to think how Londoners would get about if the Germans had won the war (we’d go from Wasserklo to Konigskreuz and from Londonbrucke to Morgentonnencroissant). And then there is the global tube map, Mark Ovenden’s construction of a Beck map that has taken over the whole world, with each station a different metro system, which is proudly displayed as this book’s endpapers.
Two of the finest faux-tube maps – the Daily Mail Moral Underground and Kono’s type map – and Beck’s own parody.
How would our man in the Brylcreem and heavy glasses have liked all of this? Probably rather well. It turns out that the first parody
of Beck’s map was by Beck himself. In March 1933, just two months after his map was first released, Beck (or someone impersonating his style and copying his signature) made fun of it in the pages of the London Transport staff magazine. People had remarked how much his map resembled an electronic circuit diagram, and so he mocked one up, an almost workable plan to make a radio in the form of the map. The Bakerlite Tube replaced the Bakerloo line, while stations were replaced both by Earth and Aerial. There was resistance, terminals and amps, and beneath it all the Thames flowed on.
Chapter 16
Maps In All Our Hands: a Brief History of the Guidebook
For many of us, our first significant experience of using a map has been abroad – in the pages of a travel guide. And so it has been for quite some time. Guidebooks are almost as old as maps. The Romans had periplus documents, noting ports and coastal landmarks, and itinerarium, which listed road stops, and in the second century, Pausanias created an impressively complete guide to the most interesting sights of the Ancient Greek world.
But for the first tourist guide worthy of the name we need to look to the year 330, when an anonymous traveller embarked on a pilgrimage and wrote an account called Itinerary from Bordeaux to Jerusalem. This was also the first boring postcard, a long listing of where he’d stayed and how long it had taken him to get there. The writer noted the number of times he had to change his transport, and found he could do Europe on two or three donkeys a day.
On the first leg – Bordeaux to Constantinople – he made 112 stops (or ‘halts’), 230 changes of donkey, and had travelled 2221 miles. The closer the traveller got to his destination, the more excited he became. His remarks became more fulsome, the sights he listed more beautiful, and his tales taller: just beyond Judea he observed Mt Syna, ‘where there is a fountain, in which, if a woman bathes, she becomes pregnant.’ The manuscript contained no maps, but the ‘A to B to C’ descriptions served in their place. The Roman roads had mile markers, and pilgrims who followed in our traveller’s footsteps would have little trouble finding their way.
Maps have guided the tourist long before the notion of tourism began (the word itself stems from the Greek word tour, meaning movement around a circle; middle-English took it further, to a trip or journey that ends up in the same place it began.) The Hereford Mappa Mundi served as both a geographical and spiritual tour for pilgrims, and John Ogilby’s strip maps escorted travellers through Britain in the seventeenth century, promising a wayside inn or famous church every few miles. But tourist maps as we understand them today had another beginning, a birth allied to the cheap portable guidebook and the beginnings of popular travel in nineteenth-century Europe.
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Before the 1830s, the Grand Tour of Europe required an educated local guide (a cicerone) and considerable amounts of money. But from 1836 onwards, the landscape was different, for you could travel through Holland, Belgium, Prussia and Northern Germany independently, armed only with a copy of what soon came to be known as a Murray. This was the first truly modern guidebook and it enabled travellers to venture where they wished, absorb as much information about a dusty monument as the heat would allow, and be assured of getting a decent dinner and bed at the end of it. Apart from the tiny point-size of the type, the Murray Handbooks for Travellers were largely the same things we might buy at a railway station or airport today: a nice bit of history, scenic and literary descriptions, detailed walking routes, passport and currency requirements, a check-list of packing essentials, recommended hotels, a few maps, and some elegant panoramic pull-out strips with a plan of a museum or the layout of Tuscan hills. The other main difference was, they were better.
Within a few years, the handbooks had become as essential a companion for the inquisitive and educated English traveller as an umbrella and emergency rations from Fortnum’s. With their success allied to growing Victorian prosperity and the rapid spread of the railways, they also achieved something else: they made travel possible for independent women, as tourists and even as guidebook writers. And with this, women discovered maps like never before. Before now, maps had primarily been a male affair, indispensable for exploration, crucial for the military, essential for planning and power. But now women began to experience the value and joy of maps not just for travel but for perusal and possibility. It was the era of maps for the masses.
John Murray III, the latest member of a flourishing London publishing dynasty (his father had secured the firm’s reputation by publishing Lord Byron and Jane Austen), had been travelling in Europe in the late 1820s when he noticed a paucity of anything that might help him make the most of his days. In Italy he found a book by Mariana Starke particularly useful (Starke was also published by his father), but elsewhere Murray found that he would arrive by brand new steam train or stagecoach, and had no idea what to do next. So he resolved to write such a thing himself, recommending the good experiences and castigating the bad. He laid out his terms for a successful template, noting that the guides had to be factual, devoid of fancy writing, and selective. ‘Arriving at a city like Berlin, I had to find out what was really worth seeing there,’ he explained. So he would provide a guide rather than an encyclopaedia, as he was keen on ‘not bewildering my readers by describing all that MIGHT be seen.’ It was the early Victorian equivalent of the What’s Hot list, and it was received by a hugely enthusiastic readership keen to discover a new Europe after the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars had curtailed travelling for twenty-five years.
Murray wrote the first few guides himself, covering Holland, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland and France, but was prevented from covering Italy when the death of his father demanded that he concentrate on publishing duties in London. And so he commissioned others, most of whom were already experts in their assigned regions.* The series ran to some sixty titles in as many years – stretching as far as imperialist India, New Zealand and Japan, and returning to concentrate on British counties. The guides soon received the ultimate sign of fame, a parodic paean in Punch:
So well thou’st played the hand-book’s part
For inn a hint, for routes a chart,
That every line I’ve got by heart,
My Murray.
(‘My Murray’ was the phrase Lord Byron used to refer to his publisher. Byron was also responsible for popularising the word ‘guidebook’, practically unheard of before it appeared in his Don Juan in 1823.)
The majority of the early handbooks consisted of routes to be accomplished in a day, but there were few maps to accompany them. Those that were included were usually secured from civic sources and then updated to show new railways and other developments. Indeed, the spread of the railway network through Europe from the mid-1830s is elegantly tracked on the Murray maps like nowhere else. But the main visual treats were unexpected, such as a fold-out engraving in the 1843 guide to Switzerland of the chain of Mont Blanc, or the pull-out of the pyramids in late-1880s Egypt, and the occasional Greek phrase-book in an envelope glued to the cover.
But great ideas tend not to profit in isolation. In Koblenz, Germany, Karl Baedeker, the son of a printer, knew a good idea when he saw one. He was a fan of the earliest Murrays, recognising just the things he had wanted to publish himself. He had issued his first guidebook to accompany the popular Rhine cruises a year before the first Murray, but he had acquired it by default when he bought a bankrupt publishing house. For his own guidebooks he adopted not only Murray’s red covers with gold lettering, but also large swathes of Murray’s text, sometimes garbling the translations. Murray’s description in an early Swiss guide of a place where ‘the rocks … are full of red garnets’ became, in the Baedeker, ‘overgrown with red pomegranates’.
Murray’s map of Bangalore, from the Handbook to India, Burma and Ceylon, 1924.
Despite the instances of plagiarism, Baedeker and Murray became friends, each agreeing not to publish in each other’s language – a promise that held good until the early 1860s, when one of Baedeker’s sons, also called Karl, couldn�
�t resist the opportunity to expand the market. But by 1860, one could argue, the Baedeker had perfected the guidebook form, outgunning even Murray to become the accepted byword for the failsafe travel companion. By the end of the century, one could easily tour the world without leaving home: in 1883 the series extended into Russia, and a decade later it had penetrated the United States. The writing was strict, unequivocal and trustworthy, the information current, the routes exhausting but fulfilling, the tastes tailored to a demanding yet non-academic readership. The whole experience was intellectually and spiritually uplifting.
Baedekering became a verb, while a Baedeker came to mean any reliable and comprehensive guide to anything (The Joy of Sex was once reviewed as A Baedeker of Bedroom Techniques.) The Baedeker style (with many parentheses denoting subsidiary yet important information such as cab fares) became influential, and Baedeker also developed the star rating system – ubiquitous now as shorthand before any arts or leisure review. Places he thought unmissable – the Tribuna in the Uffizi, for example – would get two stars for its Raphaels, but other places that met his disapproval, including Mont Blanc, were awarded no stars (‘the view from the summit is unsatisfactory’).
The guides inevitably attracted flak. In A Room with a View, E.M. Forster observed how they closed one’s mind rather than opened it, directing the traveller up or down a pew in regimental fashion and acting as a protective veil against authentic emotion. Later and more damagingly, the guides were adopted by the Nazis, who noted areas cleared of Jews, and Baedeker’s Britain served as a template for Hitler’s deliberate cultural destruction in the so-called ‘Baedeker raids’, when German bombers were sent to wipe out star-sites to demoralise the enemy.
On The Map: Why the world looks the way it does Page 22