Harry Beck, photographed by Ken Garland Harry Beck’s Tube map Ken Garland

The man behind the map

Harry Beck’s Tube map is in the top three classic British design icons, writes Dan Carrier. It’s beautiful, but practical too

Mr Beck’s Underground Map by Ken Garland
Capital Transport, £12.95 Order this book

THE sprawl of the city was proving hard to negotiate for art student Ken Garland. It was the mid-1950s: he had moved to London from a small town in Devon and his pangs of homesickness were made worse by the fact he couldn’t make head nor tail of how to get about his new home.
But then he discovered Harry Beck.
Training to be a graphic designer, Mr Garland was impressed with the maps on the walls of Tube stations. Their clarity made London seem a little less daunting for the undergraduate.
The diagrams, designed by Beck for London Underground, became a beacon for Mr Garland. It also prompted the trainee graphic designer to befriend the man behind them – and write a biography of the designer which last week made a shortlist of three of the most iconic pieces of British design from the 20th century.
Mr Garland, 77, lives in Albert Street, Camden Town, recalled how he had heard Harry Beck was working at the London College of Printing and so he paid him a lunchtime visit.
He said: “I turned up unannounced and asked around for him. He was in the canteen and so I introduced myself. He said pull up as chair and got me a coffee. We became firm friends.”
The BBC poll, which saw over 200,000 people vote over seven days for the most memorable piece of British design, was eventually won by Concorde, the recently mothballed supersonic jet.
However, Mr Garland believes the Beck map has touched as many people.
He added: “The Tube diagram is one of the greatest pieces of graphic design produced, instantly recognisable and copied across the world.”
The designer whose own work includes poster art for the St Pancras Festival and designing board games based on the Tube diagram, says writing the biography of Mr Beck was a privilege.
He said: “I had a secret admiration for him – I admit it was a bit of hero worship. His map was groundbreaking – it was only about connections and not geographical. This meant he could use only horizontal, vertical and diagonal lines. It was not to scale – the central area, which was congested with stops, is enlarged compared to the outlying areas.”
Harry died in 1974, but not before he had told Mr Garland the story behind the diagram.
Harry Beck was 29 and had been working for the Underground as engineering draughtsman since 1925, travelling to his Victoria office from his home in Highgate Village.
He wrote: “I must have lived a very energetic life in those days. Rarely missed my daily dip in Highgate Pond before breakfast and I was in the rowing club and the Train, Omnibus and Tram Staff Philharmonic Society.”
The early 1930s economic crisis saw many plans for the Tube – including a deep, fast-track line that would rush passengers from north to south, stopping at just the main stations – were mothballed. Beck was laid off.
However, work began to pile up in his old office and because he had been playing in the transport orchestra his former colleagues remembered him and, in 1933, he was re-employed.
Before he was first dismissed in 1931, he had been pondering on the messy nature of the Tube map of the time, which was geographically correct but hard to navigate.
He told Mr Garland: “Looking at the old map of the railways, it occurred to me that it might be possible to tidy it up by straightening the lines, experimenting with diagonals and evening out the distances between stations.”
His colleagues liked his idea but the publicity department of the Tube did not. But Beck continued to badger his bosses – even during the time that he did not officially work for the Underground – and in 1932 the publicity department changed their minds. They commissioned a print run of 750,000.
Mr Garland said the initial reaction from Tube users was overwhelmingly positive. “There were criticisms that the diagram was inaccurate. But the public loved it,” he said.
Beck constantly updated and improved his map: not least because the Underground system itself was expanding.
Beck would also add lines that were under construction: one such incomplete line was a route on the Northern Line linking Finsbury Park on the Victoria and Piccadilly lines with Highgate. It would mean Stroud Green and Crouch End getting their own stations, and Highgate becoming an interchange with an added line going to stops at Cranley Gardens, Muswell Hill and Alexandra Palace. His diagram of 1949 boldly shows planned extensions that, 57 years later, the residents of north London are still waiting for.