Griesmann, Sebastian - London Tube Map of 1933 PDF

Amodern 2: Network Archaeology
October 2013
HENRY CHARLES BECK, MATERIAL

CULTURE AND THE LONDON TUBE
MAP OF 1933
Sebastian Gießmann
Let us imagine Frank Pick (1878–1941) as a lucky and slightly overworked person.
When he took responsibility for the public relations of London’s subterranean trains
in 1908, no one guessed that the young lawyer and statistician was about to change
the town’s image forever. The history of urban traffic, architecture, design and art
would not be the same without Pick. It was he who commissioned the spatial
redesign of subway stations to include clear signs and more space for the public bills
of railway companies. The seminal introduction of a unified script font – the Johnston
Underground Railways Sans – owes much to his initiative. The common usage of the
red-white roundel with a blue crosspiece added to this early achievement in
corporate design. Pick emphasized the role of the public poster, thereby popularizing
graphic avant-garde art in England. Cubism, Futurism, Vorticism and the Bauhaus
became part of the public domain on the walls of London’s underground. His desire
to shape each and every aspect of the underground look was occasionally regarded
as somewhat dictatorial. Nonetheless, Pick integrated architecture itself into the
design of London Transport: Charles Holden’s elegant and functional 1920s buildings
became part of a meticulous overall concept that promoted its own modernity and
efficiency. [1] Frank Pick’s career reached its pinnacle when he was appointed as
managing director in 1928, followed by a position as chairman of the London
Passenger Transport Board, established in 1933.
We should not imagine Henry Charles Beck (1902–1974) as an unhappy person,

although his life in the 1920s was characterized by unsecure part-time jobs. Starting
in 1925, Beck worked as a draftsman at the Signal Engineer’s Office of the London
railroads. His freelance jobs were often for commercial artwork, ranging from
illustrations for the corporate magazine to public advertisements. His sketch for the
now famous Tube Map was created in 1931, during a period of unemployment, on a
spread in his personal notebook (fig. 1).
Fig. 1: Henry Charles Beck, first Tube Map sketch on

checkered paper, 1931. Pencil and ink in a notebook, 7.5 x 9.5
in. Victoria and Albert Museum London, no. E.814-1979. [2]
Beck submitted his design to the Publicity Department, headed by Frank Pick. While
his enthusiastic colleagues had encouraged Beck to do so, it was regarded as being
“too revolutionary” and discarded by the public relations office. [3] One year later he
revised the first draft and received a less reluctant response. Pick remained skeptical
towards the new network map. Finally, he ordered a risky first print run of 750,000
copies in January 1933. One month later, another 100,000 copies were printed.
Harry Beck received pay of about nine dollars for this original piece of work, which
had been sketched during a time of unemployment. Though his job situation became
more steady in the 1930s, Beck never attained the same level of recognition as the
London Transport employees. In return for signing over his copyright, the draftsman
insisted that all future network changes be done by him personally. [4] He became
embittered when London Transport repeatedly disregarded this agreement, and until
his work was rediscovered in the 1990s Beck remained virtually unknown. Despite
these difficulties, his role needs to be emphasized, for the Tube Map design has
proven to be a genuine solution to passenger navigation, even though institutional
Sebastian Gießmann, HENRY CHARLES BECK, MATERIAL CULTURE AND THE LONDON TUBE MAP OF 1933
Amodern 2: Network Archaeology, October 2013

struggles almost prevented Beck’s work from being used. For London, as we shall
see, it came at exactly the right time.
But how shall we imagine underground railroad travel in London around 1930? What
kind of changes did Pick’s and Beck’s innovations bring with them? The following
approach tackles the fluidity and ephemerality of urban transport, while exploring its
material media culture and the 1920s as the “age of traffic.” [5] Its protagonists are
not primarily a manager and a draftsman, although they both play significant roles.
More importantly, I shall present elements of a material network archaeology: daily
passengers, emerging masses, urban events, tickets, metro plans, stations’
architecture, time recorders for trains, overwritten timetables, delay diagrams,
signal boxes, governmental infrastructure policy and film fragments. While
materiality is not a key point in social network analysis (SNA) and the thriving formal
science of complex networks, it is foundational for the archaeology of networking
practices. So the humanities are obliged to emphasize the materiality of networks
while taking their mediations into account. The question to be posed alongside actor-
network theory (ANT) and the German research on cultural techniques (
Kulturtechniken) is: Which hybrid material and semiotic elements mobilize and
stabilize an urban network that is used for movement? In drawing on the historical
networking practices needed for this, I am going to place emphasis on the
uniqueness and situated character of networks – as opposed to generalizing universal
theories like social network analysis and complex networks science. Therefore, I will
analyze the tacit operations of the London Transport railroad writing systems, their
localized use in the formation of network time, and the specific relationship between
perception and circulation. Following Beck’s map not only shows how urban
perception became accustomed to nodes and connections; the Tube Map also played
an integral role in twentieth-century network history, which in itself shifted more and
more to practical timing issues, and to logistical temporization in general. To handle
the ever-fluctuating traffic, techniques of synchronization became more and more
important.
1. Henry Charles Beck Draws the Metropolis
If you’re going underground, why do you need to bother about

geography? It’s not so important. Connections are the thing.

— Henry Charles Beck [6]
Picture the London of 1891. The German engineer Ludwig Troske wrote about the
very first and very steamy subway, which had been in use ever since 1863: “Traffic
on the suburban lines is not very comfortable for the foreign traveler at first. A
certain exercise and routine is necessary to orientate easily and quickly. Once one is
out of bright daylight, approaching the station, the eye attempts to adapt to the new
surroundings. … The varying trains possess certain distinctive features on their front
sides. Alas, in all that dim station light, along with the comparatively fast approaches,
such signs only help the expert.” Not only boarding the train but also disembarking
requires concentration, “because the mandatory call of the station’s name often
remains incomprehensible. The name of the station is otherwise only written in small
lettering and attached to several lantern posts…” Signposts on the wall appear lost
within the swarm of advertisements. [7]
Now picture the London of 1933. London Transport, a conglomerate of six railroad
lines organized in five companies, published a new kind of map. The “Tube” had been
electrified starting in 1890, with most reconstructions done by 1910. On the reverse
side of the new map, there was a list of station names and a very polite invitation
reflecting the typical style of public relations created by Frank Pick: “A new design
for an old map. We welcome your comments.”
Fig. 2: Henry Charles Beck, Tube Map, January 1933. Color

lithograph, first edition, 9.0 x 6.3 in. Printed at Waterlow &

Sons Ltd., London, Dunstable, Watford. [8]
The requested comments of London’s subway audience disappeared as part of oral

history. Nonetheless, the somewhat magical transformation of a topographical map
(fig. 3) in a topological diagram has provoked a multitude of scholarly comments.
Fig. 3: Frederick H. Stingemore, Underground Railways of

London, 1932. Color lithograph, 5.5 x 6.5 in. Printed by David
Allen Printing Co., London. [9]
In the context of art and design history, the altered Tube Map has been understood
to be a part of Constructivism and of everyday mythology as per Roland Barthes. [10]
Current research prefers to focus on the map as an “immutable mobile” with
reference to Bruno Latour. [11] Most approaches leave out the material network
archaeology of subterranean traveling and the organization of public transport in the
1920s and 1930s. My take on the subject is going to emphasize these phenomena.

Henry Charles Beck’s seminal design has also been reappreciated through recent
scholarship that describes its aesthetics as a modernist electromechanical
imagination of ordered space-time. [12] London Transport willingly ignored Beck’s
influence, but within the last 25 years historians have rehabilitated the designer and
made him very popular. [13]
If we trace the steps of this late triumph, the perspective might change a bit from the
map’s geometric overview to historical contingencies and contradictions. It is well
known that Beck’s coworkers compared the specific aesthetics of his drawing to
circuit diagrams. Beck himself whimsically made fun of that attribution when a
caricature was published in the company’s Train, Omnibus and Tram Staff Magazine
in March 1933 (fig. 4).
Fig. 4: Henry Charles Beck, Underground “Straight Eight” All-

Electric Skit-Set Circuit Diagram, March 1933. Drawing in
Train, Omnibus, and Tram Staff Magazine. [14]
In this sketch, the river Thames figures as a logarithmical curve: there is high
tension at the Bank of England; the British Museum serves as a “wonder plug”; an
antenna becomes the top part of the Piccadilly line. Therefore, the circuit has to be
earthed in the southern portion. This adds to the famous circuit diagram hypothesis,
which we even might extend. Could it be that the Tube Map uses a semeiological
form that refers to the tacit practices of train management, its railway control

centers and signal boxes, therefore including very specific techniques of
synchronization?
Even the last surface landmark of the Tube Map proves Beck’s intention to abandon
the topographical scale. The highly abstract Thames River is drawn using angles of
45 degrees. The consistent use of these angles creates the hitherto unknown
systemic regularity of the rail network. On another note, the Tube Map fulfills a
mathematical criterion for networks: neither angles nor the length of lines must
mimic real geographical relations. Beck added an important graphic detail when he
decided to picture stations without a transfer point through small “ticks” as opposed
to the diamonds and circles of interchanges. He also integrated an already known
technique that drew the periphery closer to the center. [15] The distances in Central
London appear greater than they actually are, while the distance between suburban
stations in so-called “metroland” is reduced for the purpose of the diagram. This
approximation of the suburbs follows a social transformation of urban space: at the
end of the nineteenth century the railroad system had begun to allow the poorer
class a life in the surrounding areas of London. [16]
In the end, the Tube Map proves to be an index for a relational and topological turn
on a wider scale, [17] which is pushed a bit further by the emergence of the diagram
itself. In the case of London, topography transforms into a highly specific form of
topology. The diagram rationalizes the fluid relationality of traffic flows in a
geometric manner. For this, the paper grid underlying the first sketch plays a
significant role. Upon closer look, Beck’s omission of geography is not complete. The
correction fluid on the first sketch shows the manner in which geometric topology
and geographical references interact (fig. 1). Yet geographical measures count less
within this framework, and relational Constructivism overcomes a rather mimetic
approach.
The Tube Map imports the aesthetics of Eastern and Middle European avant-gardes,
including Constructivism and the Bauhaus. Frank Pick’s public relations strategy also
proved to be extremely attractive to artists like Man Ray and László Moholy-Nagy.
Both delivered highly spectacular poster works for London Transport in the 1930s.
[18] In this context, Moholy-Nagy designed a world network map for the Imperial
Airways airline that transferred Beck’s topological aesthetics to the connections of

world air traffic while juxtaposing a diagram and a map view (fig. 5).

Fig. 5: László Moholy-Nagy, Imperial Airways Map of Empire &
European Air Routes, April 1936. Color lithograph, 39.1 x 25 in.
British Airways Archive and Museum Collection, Hounslow. [19]
The rediscovery of Beck’s importance – which can even be found in statements like
“We’d be lost without Harry Beck” – is imbued with new emphasis. [20] Many
comments insist repeatedly that the Tube Map is based on an evolution from map to
diagram. This seems overly simplified if we remember Nelson Goodman’s statement
that all maps, being geometric figures, are diagrams, yet not all diagrams depict
maps. [21] Quite often “the DIAGRAM” has been written in capital letters to describe
the Tube Map. All of this does not yet reveal how the material practices of railroad
operation around 1930 relied heavily on diagrammatic schemes. In the context of
network archaeology, the question is raised as to how spatial and temporal forms of
traffic flows are constituted by diagrams which are situated between drawing,
writing, calculating, movement and time. The production of simultaneity and the
synchronization of traffic events prove to be a key condition for the success of rail
networks: the switching of passengers at interchanges. The abstract aesthetics of the
Tube Map should also be understood as temporal – picturing a perfectly timed
network. This goes along with a repeatedly projected, yet impossible synchronization
of the network on timekeeping and on socioeconomic levels.
Henry C. Beck’s map should be understood in the context of the following

phenomena:
1. The merger of the five independent, market-listed, constantly quarreling railroad

companies running the six London lines. Starting in July 1933, these actors were
united in the London Passenger Transport Board (LPTB). The chaos of independent
lines and different prices was recognizable in the multitude of different tickets that
existed before 1933. [22] The longing for a “penny transport” to meet the same ends
as Rowland Hill’s unification of post tariffs in the 1840s is a vivid part of the cultural
history of London’s railroads. [23]
2. The continual updating of an iconic design that started with the introduction of the
discus-like, bull’s-eye trademark in 1908, [24] followed by Edward Johnston’s
corporate font Underground Railway Sans in 1918 [25] – including Frank Pick’s
constant push for an unique corporate identity.
3. The movements of passengers in the station’s architectures, especially the

switching between different lines, which kept Henry Charles Beck occupied until the
end of his life. [26]
4. The ambitious attempt of spatiotemporal synchronization in the entire London

network, which was already quite advanced on the level of timekeeping and
operations management.
2. London Transport: Synchronization along the

Line
[L]a forme d’une ville / Change plus vite, hélas, que le cœur d’un mortel …
— Charles Baudelaire, Tableaux Parisiens [27]
Scenario 1: Paper – Hand – Telephone
Handling urban railroad traffic significantly differs from that of overland trains.
Nineteenth-century England saw the rise of a specific intermedial constellation,
including optical semaphores, Charles Wheatstone’s five-needle telegraph, and steam
trains. Overland traffic called for the introduction of a standard time that was based
on the timetable. [28] In an urban environment, however, managing a high train
frequency is much more important. The impulse for more electromechanical control
might have started with the overland lines. In the accelerated tact of metropolitan
space, a networked control was to become ever more important.
For instance, the contingent positions of moving trains could be traced in three
different scenarios of synchronization, which required paper records or blinking light
bulbs on an illuminated diagram. For the alliance of telegraph and railroads, the
telephone started to assume importance, although the operating companies were
skeptical to use phones in the beginning.
The contemporary trade journal Railway Gazette regularly portrayed the manifold
interconnected apparatuses, ranging from signal boxes to automated telephone
switching, including the control rooms of land lines. A photographic example from
the year 1932 offers a general view of how the practices of recording train movement
worked. It shows the control room of the London & North Eastern Railway at
Darlington, between Durham and York (fig. 6).

Fig. 6: Control Room of the London & North Eastern Railway
with the graphic recording of train runs (left), Darlington, 1932.
[29]
On a blotting pad – simply called a graph – train traffic was noted down via a hand-
drawn pencil line. Utilizing a piece of paper with a vertical division into hours and
minutes, every message from the train line was noted “in relation to time and place”
so that a continuous line emerged. [30]
Seen within this context, the topological form of Beck’s map was tied to the everyday
office work of directing and recording railroad traffic. Both writing systems were
based on an adjusted Cartesian coordinate system. Though typographic and aesthetic
viewpoints add to the form of the Tube Map, it also relied heavily on the everyday
norms of railroad writing systems.
Scenario 2: Pneumatics – Levers – Electrical

Impulse
The actual complexity of the networked control of urban trains can be seen in a ten-
minute training film from 1921, whose second part is slightly fragmentary.
Signalling on the Ealing and Shepherd’s Bush Railway reenacts, through its rhythm
of intertitles and documentary material, a splendid absence of any disturbances in
mechanical and electromechanical control. [31] It presents the linear measures
needed for manual shunting, including filmic disruptions in the second part of the
film, which in its surviving form includes abrupt cuts and an announcement for
material; the material is never shown. The use of the train as a self-writing system
was quite remarkable. Crossing a lever along the line caused electrical signaling.
With the train’s passage the signal lever was reset, and the momentary position of a
train within a section flashed in an illuminated diagram (fig. 7).

Fig. 7: Illuminated diagram for train localization. Digital film
still from Signalling on the Ealing and Shepherd’s Bush Railway
, 1921 [2007]. [32]
The corresponding intertitle of the film notes the following: “illuminated diagram
informs signalman position of all trains.” Yet behind this declaration some unspoken
contradictions remain hidden. As the film progresses, only the transmission of
shunting to the signalman is shown. Even if we take into account that the electro-
pneumatic shunting switches were used for the feedback of the actual state, only a
momentarily passed train movement of unknown speed would be signaled. [33] The
railroad employees were working against this form of temporal contingency, but they
could never escape it completely. [34] Conclusions like “the fewer the signals, the
fewer the trains” provoked the continual development of signaling installations that,
in turn, were designed to guarantee a higher frequency due to less distance between
trains. [35] The speed of the rolling trains created the most contingencies by
producing them itself. Moving objects demanded a further synchronization in time.
Unsurprisingly, London Transport began with the massive statistic measurement of
train frequencies and delays after World War I. [36]
Technically, the British train equipment, which was predominately made by
Westinghouse, oscillated between two-state and three-state differences. The most
common forms were either “clear” and “danger” or “on” and “off.” Optical
semaphores – with exactly three angles of 0, 45 and 90 degrees – hint at the
operations evoked by the Tube Map’s geometry. In the London underground tunnels,
optical semaphores were not really useful; flashlights with two colors were used
instead. The code “go/stop” has proven to be the most helpful in surroundings where
trains run with the same speed and a similar kind of acceleration and deceleration.
Historically, the flashlight’s code probably resulted from the binary difference of the
weather-warning fog repeaters that replaced the older acoustic warnings of a
responsible fog man. [37] The difference between “go” and “stop” was also related to
a material reason: foggy or non-foggy weather.
Scenario 3: Paper – Clocks – Network Timing
What happens once an underground train is delayed? How to deal with the masses of
passengers that are so typical on a London soccer Sunday? Measuring, control and
corrections generated delay diagrams, overwritten timetables and filled-out signal
report failure forms. A revised timetable from the contemporary handbook
Handling London’s Underground Traffic

of 1928 shows how asynchronicity and resynchronization were being handled (fig. 8).
Fig. 8: Revised timetable after interval changes on

the District Line, ca. 1928. [38]
The only four-color reproduction found in the book represents a tiny change in the
train management of the District Railway. This is not entirely accidental – the District
Railway, pictured in green, is used by soccer fans to get to the stadiums of West Ham
and Chelsea. In this case, the early morning times demonstrated how the complex
practices of coordination interact: trains that would not have stopped needed to halt
at stations that they did not regularly serve. On another note, a London underground
line quite often is not really linear, because it integrates several starting points.
District Line trains start in Ealing Broadway as well as in Richmond and Wimbledon.
This way, trains had to be coordinated behind Gunnersbury and West Kensington,
with a high potential for getting stuck. Without this everyday tacit knowledge,
including the economic competition between the single lines, the timetable remains
largely illegible. John Pattinson Thomas, Operating Manager and author of
Handling London’s Underground Traffic, described the situation:

Throughout the various routes covered by the trains of the District
Railway there are ten branches. A train may be delayed at Wimbledon, for
instance, owing either to unsuitable fog-signalling arrangements or
overcrowding, and by the time it reaches Earl’s Court it has missed its
path and has to be sandwiched in at the wrong place. This may mean that
it fouls the working of a Circle train at South Kensington, causing trains
to block back on the bottle neck on a tight 1 1/2-minute headway. Signal
to signal checking then occurs, and from an initial 2-minute delay on the
branch line an accumulated delay of 10 or 12 minutes may be set up. [39]
Nonetheless, the railroader’s honor obliged him to limit those potential harms:
“Delays, however, are happily of rare occurrence…” [40]
Apart from the timetable, the interval on the line had to be clocked and recorded.
The maximum capacity of a line without loop was 48 trains per hour, which were
reset at the end point within 75 seconds. With signaling rigs that were ideally
equipped, the minimum distance between trains was 54 seconds, with perfect train
stops lasting for only 30 seconds. [41] Although the remote control of trains via
electrical relays was already possible, the train conductor served as the most
important timekeeper. In stations with tight traffic, an automatic headway clock was
used (fig. 9).
Fig. 9: Headway clock monitoring the distance to the previous

train, ca. 1928. [42]
The headway clock was set to zero once a train leaves the station. The following

driver was able to see how far ahead in time the train in front actually is, so he did
not “unconsciously” get too close. [43] Headway clocks permitted the recording of
train frequencies on paper. Along with a headway chart, a very specific underground
time was both represented and performed. Every inscription referenced, via an
inking ribbon, a bypassed train (fig. 10).
Fig. 10: Headway chart recording the train frequency

throughout a day of operation, ca. 1928. [44]
The quicker the passages, the harder it becomes to differentiate the trains. A railroad
day of headway charts had a very material length of nineteen hours. If you draw
together the recordings of all six lines, a genuine form of networked time appears.
Although it followed the telegraphic synchronization of clocks in the nineteenth
century, it also had its very own distinctive features. [45]
3. London Transport: Synchronizing the Network

The metro is no place for synchrony, in spite of the orderliness of
timetables…
— Marc Augé [46]
All forms of synchronization along the line added to the complexity of the whole
network. But they did not allow for overall control. With electromechanical
transmission, the data of the Taylorist time punch clocks united to form the framed
overall picture that was the Train Recording Diagram (fig. 11).
Fig. 11: Automatic Train Recording Diagram for the

complete London network, with electrical transmission to
headquarters and control rooms, ca. 1928. [47]

Here, too, the dial rotated with clock speed while the self-inscribing train passages
hinted at the simultaneity of network traffic. It might be said that the Train
Recording Diagram was a time-measuring and synchronizing equivalent to the
topological Tube Map, which it predated.
Its setup in the control office at Leicester Square in 1928 was meant to be a
paradigm for equipping the other facilities, “so that the engineering and operating
staff will be advised at once, and simultaneously, of the occurrence.” [48] Such a will
to synchronicity was not only important for the safe conduct of traffic; it also allowed
the electricity to be switched off punctually. A synchronous “traction off” was the
economic imperative once all trains had come to a halt.
Tactics: Entering, Changing, Disembarking or

“Connections Are the Thing”
There is at least one other way to narrate the always sought, yet impossible
synchronization within the London underground network. This would be a history of
entering, changing and disembarking passengers, including both the visual
navigation and the acoustic environment. In London’s everyday tube culture, public
announcements have been present for a long time. If you used the escalators of the
Hampstead Line in 1921 – which is now the Northern Line – you surely could not
have overheard the messages of an apparatus called the “stentorphone” – “Please
keep moving: if you must stand, stand on the right: some are in a hurry, don’t impede
them.” [49] The then contemporary use of gramophones with compressed air
amplifier, e.g., at Oxford Circus, consumed about one record a week. Passenger
education even made its way into short films dealing with boarding and
disembarking. Enjoyable films like The Right and Wrong Way to Board an Electric
Train were meant to appeal to audiences and speed up train handling at the same
time. [50]
John Pattinson Thomas’s handbook of 1928 also identified the changing of trains,
being a crucial part of network connectivity, as one of the most problematic aspects
of tube management:
A different type of connection occurs where the Underground line crosses

under or over, but does not physically connect with, another Underground
or foreign railway line. This may necessitate (as it does at Charing Cross,

the interchange point of District, Hampstead and Bakerloo trains) the
synchronization of the times of the first and last trains each day, and this
is always carefully carried out. [51]
Regulating the passenger streams between the lines proved to be a top priority
during the remodeling of stations, like the newly designed Piccadilly Circus in 1928
(fig. 12).
Fig. 12: Unknown artist [D. Macpherson?], Piccadilly

Circus station, 1928. Graphic reproduction. [52]
Besides Harry Beck, many draftsmen tried to find appropriate ways of picturing the
complex, thick subterranean space. This included more than a reduction of the
entangled lines. Take Beck’s lifelong work, for example. Few things deserved his
attention more than the graphic representation of interchanges (fig. 13).

Fig. 13: Henry Charles Beck, pencil sketches on the topology of
Euston and King’s Cross stations, 1961. [53]
The elderly Beck described his very practical theory of topological space as follows:
“If you’re going underground, why do you need to bother about geography? It’s not
so important. Connections are the thing.” [54] Charles Holden’s station architectures
and Frank Pick’s design guidelines strove for that kind of pragmatic aesthetics of
connections, too. Stations were illuminated by special light installations as entry
points to underground space. For the interior, Pick insisted on clear, indirect lights
for the ceilings, therefore simplifying the passage to the platforms. [55]
The tactics of passengers and the smart changing of trains seem to be of transient
nature when confronted with the strategies of drawn diagrams and architecture. [56]
The transitory mass ornament of traffic continues to be embodied by a number of
anonymous individuals. [57] We might concur with Marc Augé in saying that the
experience of a subterranean train journey is rarely a collective one, although it
happens in a shared space. The metro is not the place of synchronous mass traffic,
despite the collective rules – no smoking, “passage interdit,” et cetera. Everyone
individually celebrates his or her own parties and birthdays, the topography of
liaisons, work, leisure, and so forth. [58] In the common web of personal routes, each
person takes part in the larger urban identity: community without celebration and
loneliness without isolation, as Augé puts it. Meanwhile, the station names form a
ritual sacrality of the metro as a lieu de mémoire (Platz der Luftbrücke, Bastille,
Waterloo). [59] The metropolis of the 1920s must be understood as an embodied
sphere of circulation – a sphere in which the appropriation of new technologies forms
a new culture of perception. [60]
Few historical documents have been able to grasp the specific everyday culture of
moving through the netherworlds of the city. Silent witnesses like the newly
introduced ticket vending machines of the 1920s counted passengers; statistics were
meant to normalize their behavior. The introduction of common railway pictograms
by the International Railway Union in 1932 reflects another trace of strategy. [61]
Finally, an action movie like Bulldog Jack (1935) does not tell of much entering,
changing or disembarking of trains, but it transposes the passage itself into
operation. [62]
Being part of a private-eye serial, Bulldog Jack presents an eight-minute, high-speed

finale that develops a personal form of navigation along the line. Right at the moment
when the film’s villain Morell escapes on a train with jewels from the British
Museum, detective Bulldog Drummond and his friends attempt to stop him. [63]
While the hero brawls with Mr. Morell, his sidekick denotes the passed stations by
putting a checkmark behind every name on the fictitious line (fig. 14): “Holden Brew
– only four more stations! … White City – only three more! Ooooh! ! … Two more, two
more! Ooooh! ! … Only one more! This is the end. Ooooh! ! We’re gonna crash, we’re
gonna crash!”
Fig. 14: Orientation along the line in Bulldog Jack, 1935. Digital
film still from VHS video, 2007. [64]
This kind of relocalization becomes ever more prominent in the film, as the velocity
gets higher and the cuts to station and tube architecture get shorter.
The characters of Bulldog Jack impersonate a new kind of urban passenger who must
reorientate constantly. A big difference exists between nineteenth-century overland
travels and the daily underground pathways. [65] Riding the tube demands the active
aisthesis of disappearance, which Paul Virilio has so genuinely portrayed. [66] While
the spatiotemporal paths between stations fade out, they return as the structural
moment of an action film sequence. Within the moving images – just like in the
railway control centers – the necessity for constant relocation is given. To paraphrase
the words of Bernhard Siegert and Michel de Certeau: traveling on or with maps

means a constant fissure between carte and parcours. This gap in addressing creates
a temporal interval that calls for further timely synchronizations along the line and in
the complete network. In the midst of architectural space, the passenger’s attention
turns mainly to interchanges and temporalities of traffic. [67]
Strategies: Synchronization as a Governmental

Interest; Electrical Grid and Railway Network
Is there a way to set up a state of political synchronization for the future? Above and
beyond network timing via diagrams and technical apparatuses, the Tube Map also
emerged in the context of a governmental decision. [68] To counter the notorious
asynchronicity of London traffic and British power supply, political stakeholders tried
to move to state-centered forms of administration, a process starting with the
electricity grid in 1926 and the London Transport facilities in 1931. The parallel
centralization of metropolitan traffic and national power supply might be the most
important political and economic background for the Tube Map. [69]
English railroads were always characterized by a multitude of independently run

lines. The same was true for power supply and generating plants. In 1913, London
had 65 plants, 32 different voltages for transmission, 24 for delivery and about 70
methods for measuring and accounting. [70] The resulting problems were prosaically
commented on: “The largest city in the world offers an excellent example of what
electric supply ought not to be.” [71] Within this jungle, the urban railroad companies
decided to run their own power plants, as opposed to centrally run systems like in
Berlin and Chicago. [72] The national grid was initially designed to tackle those
problems and was set up between 1930 and 1936.
Making the London metro part of an integrated traffic network also proved to be a
longtime endeavor. [73] By initiative of the Labour Minister of Transport Herbert
Morrison (1888–1965), a bill for the establishment of the London Passenger
Transport Board was put on the legislative agenda. Even after the fall of the Labour
minority government, the bill ran through the parliamentary process until it was
passed as an act. In the meantime, politicians tried to convince the owners of bus
companies, railroads and tramlines to unite. The Railway Gazette issues that were
published between 1930 and 1932 are full of reports on the complicated, nerve-
stretching meetings headed by Lord Ashfield. [74]
My thesis is the following: the Tube Map proved to be politically useful, once it had

become an instant part of public space. With the overdue centralization of
infrastructure already in progress, its circulating copies presented a graphically
unified network. This, however, was an unplanned coincidence. The diagram turned
out to be also usable as an icon for perfect organization. Harry Beck’s sense for
spatial navigation met the governmental interest: on July 1, 1933 the London
Passenger Transport Board was officially inaugurated and put to work. [75] At the
same time, the Tube Map delivered a more regular pictorial representation of an
electrical grid than all the graphics coming from the engineers of the national
Central Electricity Board (CEB). Both infrastructures could only be ordered by state
authority. Therefore, we should understand the Tube Map as a machine-like control
diagram that also installed a mental map originating from the urban underground. It
created and marked a space of clear and uncongested circulation. On the backside
remained the uncontrollable bodies and objects, while the materiality of architecture
surrounded all floating and halting traffic. [76]
London’s decentralized, networked railroad time and networked space had emergent
yet disperse qualities that called for a synchronization and centralization of
infrastructure. The Tube Map itself, while being a genuine design invention and an
icon of electricity, was also a monument of municipal administration ideals for the
optimal flow of passengers and goods.
Fig. 15: Lilian Dring, LPTB Modern God of Transport, ca. 1933.
Draft for a poster triptych, 14.5 x 29.5 in. [77]
Yet this important change evoked a further artistic response that combined urban
spatial network practices, the aesthetics of relationality and a sense for network
history. In 1933, the graphic designer Lilian Dring offered Frank Pick a poster
triptych (which was never printed, regrettably). It portrays the newly established

London Passenger Transport Board in the body of Hermes as the “Modern God of
Transport.” Antiquity’s messenger of the gods incorporates the roundel as his heart,
Beck’s underground lines as arteries and veins, and the serpentine underground car
as a snake around the god’s arms (fig. 15). Just like in Beck’s circuit mockery version
of the Tube Map, Dring plays with the city’s landmarks: the mouth is represented by
the BBC building, the ears by the Royal Albert Hall, the eyes by the National Gallery
and the throat by the Tower Bridge. With this kind of urban self-description, the
draftswoman has conjured the older traditions of urban communication that took
corporeal blood circulation as a point of reference. These are combined with a
constructivist setting of relations, which is so typical for Beck’s network aesthetics.
These two historical strata are symbolically connected and transformed by Hermes;
the reference to antiquity encompasses the reticular aesthetics of early modernity
and also the geometric exactness of modernity. Dring’s poster calls for the deeper
strata of the very long cultural history of networks to which our attention should turn.
[78] Even in high modernity, amidst the greatest “network fever,” [79] material
network archaeology profits from the irritation fostered by amodern practices and
regimes of knowledge.
1.
On Frank Pick’s biography, see Christian Barman, The Man Who Built London
Transport: A Biography of Frank Pick (Newton Abbot, London, and North
Pomfret: David & Charles, 1979); Oliver Green, Underground Art: London
Transport Posters, 1908 to the Present, 2nd ed. (London: Laurence King
Publishing, 2001), 8–9. On European cultural transfer, see Ulrike Weber,
“Building the Tube: Zur Londoner Rezeption der Berliner U- und S-Bahnhöfe in
den 1920er/30er Jahren,” in Berlin über und unter der Erde: Alfred Grenander,
die U-Bahn und die Kultur der Metropole, ed. Aris Fioretos (Berlin: Nicolaische
Verlagsbuchhandlung, 2006), 88–95. ↩
2.
Ken Garland, Mr Beck’s Underground Map (Harrow Weld, Middlesex: Capital
Transport Publishing, 1994), 16. ↩
3.
See Beck’s statement in Garland, Mr Beck’s Underground Map, 17. ↩
4.
Letter to Christian Barman, Publicity Office, June 2, 1938. See Garland,
Mr Beck’s Underground Map, 32. ↩

5.
Siegfried Kracauer called his present the “age of traffic” (Zeitalter des
Verkehrs). This is poorly translated in the English version of The Salaried
Masses as “age of travel.” Siegfried Kracauer, Die Angestellten: Aus dem
neuesten Deutschland, suhrkamp taschenbuch wissenschaft 13 (Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp, 1971), 97. See Helmut Lethen, Verhaltenslehren der Kälte:
Lebensversuche zwischen den Kriegen, edition suhrkamp 1884 (Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp, 1994), 44–45; Johannes Roskothen, Verkehr: Zu einer
poetischen Theorie der Moderne (Munich: Fink, 2003), 44ff. ↩
6.
Harry Beck in a talk with Ken Garland, retold by Garland in the BBC show
Design Classics in 1994, quoted by Janin Hadlaw, “The London Underground
Map: Imagining Modern Time and Space,” Design Issues 19, no. 1 (2003):
25–35, esp. 32 ↩
7.
Ludwig Troske, Die Londoner Untergrundbahnen (Berlin: Julius Springer,
1892), 63. ↩
8.
Garland, Mr Beck’s Underground Map, 19. ↩
9.
10.
See Hadlaw, “The London Underground Map.” ↩
11.
See Janet Vertesi, “Mind the Gap: The London Underground Map and Users’
Representation of Urban Space,” Social Studies of Science 38, no. 1 (2008):
7–33. ↩
12.
See Paul Elliman, “Signal Failure,” in Else/Where: Mapping; New
Cartographies of Networks and Territories, ed. Janet Abrams and Peter Hall
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 166–75, esp. 175 on the
Tube Map’s status as icon of network efficienty and as a metaphor for an urban
electrified machine. ↩
13.
See Garland, Mr Beck’s Underground Map. On the general history of London

Transport, see Theodore Cardwell Barker and Michael Robbins, A History of
London Transport: Passenger Travel and the Development of the Metropolis,
vol. II (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1974); Desmond Felix Croome and Alan
Arthur Jackson, Rails through the Clay: A History of London’s Tube Railways
(Harrow Weld, Middlesex: Capital Transport Publishing, 1993). A diagrammatic
history of the network can be found in Douglas Rose, The London Underground:
A Diagrammatic History, 7th ed. (Harrow Weld, Middlesex: Capital Transport
Publishing, 2000). ↩
14.
15.
Harry Beck describes this effect himself: “I tried to imagine that I was using a
convex lens or mirror, so as to present the central area on a larger scale.”
16.
See Richard Sennett, Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western
Civilization (New York, London, and Norton, 1994), 332–33. ↩
17.
Just think of Cassirer’s work on the shift from substance to relation in Ernst
Cassirer, “Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff: Untersuchungen über die
Grundfragen der Erkenntniskritik,” in Gesammelte Werke 6: Hamburger
Ausgabe, ed. Birgit Recki (Hamburg: Meiner, 2000). ↩
18.
See Green, Underground Art, 77 on Man Ray and Achim Borchardt-Hume, eds.,
Albers and Moholy-Nagy: From the Bauhaus to the New World (London: Tate
Publications, 2006), 64. ↩
19.
Borchardt-Hume, Albers and Moholy-Nagy, 58. ↩
20.
Sarah Johnstone and Tom Masters, London City Guide (London: Lonely Planet
Publications, 2006), 34. ↩
21.
Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols, 2nd
ed. (1968; repr., Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1976), 173–74. The relation
of diagrammatics and topography is only approximately described by such an

understanding. See the criticism in Bernhard Siegert, “Repräsentationen
diskursiver Räume: Einleitung,” in Topographien der Literatur: Deutsche
Literatur im transnationalen Kontext, ed. Hartmut Böhme (Stuttgart and
Weimar: J.B. Metzler, 2005), 3–11, esp. 4. ↩
22.
See Barker and Robbins, A History of London Transport, 352-353. ↩
23.
See the early account “The Metropolitan Railway” by Henry Mayhew from the
year 1865, in London Underground: Poems and Prose about the Tube, ed.
Tobias Döring (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2003), 14–34, esp. 29–30. ↩
24.
On the institutional backgrounds, see David Leboff and Tim Demuth,
No Need to Ask! Early Maps of London’s Underground Railways (Harrow Weld,
Middlesex: Capital Transport Publishing, 1999), 44. On the iconography of the
logo, see Barker and Robbins, A History of London Transport, 179. ↩
25.
First cut in 1916. See Garland, Mr Beck’s Underground Map, 21. ↩
26.
See Garland, Mr Beck’s Underground Map, 68ff. ↩
27.
Charles Baudelaire, “Le Cygne/Der Schwan,” in Sämtliche Werke in 8 Bänden,
vol. 3 (1857; repr., Frankfurt am Main: Zweitausendeins, 1995), 226–31, esp.
228. ↩
28.
See Elliman, “Signal Failure,” 172. ↩
29.
Anonymous, “Centralised Control of Railway Traffic,” The Railway Gazette and
Railway News, January 22, 1932, 106–7 and 115. ↩
30.
Anonymous, “Centralised Control of Railway Traffic,” 107. ↩
31.
Signalling on the Ealing and Shepherd’s Bush Railway, 1921. London Transport
Museum, Film Collection, No. 121. ↩
32.

London Transport Museum, Film Collection, No. 121. ↩
33.
See John Pattinson Thomas, Handling London’s Underground Traffic (London:
London’s Underground, 1928), 83. ↩
34.
On train signals and shunting as examples of mechanical feedback, see Norbert
Wiener, Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the
Machine, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1965), 98. Many thanks to Lasse
Scherffig for this hint. ↩
35.
Thomas, Handling London’s Underground Traffic, 58. ↩
36.
Thomas, Handling London’s Underground Traffic, 55-56. ↩
37.
Thomas, Handling London’s Underground Traffic, 82–83. ↩
38.
39.
Thomas, Handling London’s Underground Traffic, 74-75. ↩
40.
41.
Thomas, Handling London’s Underground Traffic, 61, 86. ↩
42.
43.
44.
45.
See Peter Galison, Einstein’s Clocks, Poincarés Maps (New York and London:
Norton & Company, 2003), 98–99. ↩
46.
Marc Augé, Un ethnologue dans le métro, 2nd ed. (Paris: Hachette, 2002), 45.

Translation by the author. ↩
47.
48.
49.
See Croome and Jackson, Rails through the Clay, 154. ↩
50.
The right and wrong way to board an electric train, 1920. London Transport
Museum, Film Collection, No. 125. The film was distributed by Gaumont. ↩
51.
Thomas, Handling London’s Underground Traffic, 31. On connectivitiy and
interconnectivity, see Hartmut Böhme, “Netzwerke: Zur Theorie und
Geschichte einer Konstruktion,” in Netzwerke: Eine Kulturtechnik der Moderne
, ed. Jürgen Barkhoff, Hartmut Böhme, and Jeanne Riou (Cologne: Böhlau,
2004), 17–36, esp. 19. ↩
52.
Barker and Robbins, A History of London Transport, 288-289. ↩
53.
54.
Hadlaw, “The London Underground Map,” 32. ↩
55.
See Thomas, Handling London’s Underground Traffic, 170–71. ↩
56.
On urban passenger tactics, see Stefan Höhne, “Token Tactics:
Artefaktpolitiken in der New Yorker City Subway,” in Versorgung und
Entsorgung der Moderne: Logistiken und Infrastrukturen der 1920er und
1930er Jahre, ed. Wiebke Porombka, Heinz Reif, and Erhard Schütz (Frankfurt
am Main et al.: Peter Lang, 2011), 73–87. ↩
57.
In reference to Siegfried Kracauer, see Roskothen, Verkehr, 77. ↩
58.
See Augé, Un ethnologue dans le métro, 45. ↩

59.
See Augé, Un ethnologue dans le métro, 45, 54. ↩
60.
See Roskothen, Verkehr, 83. ↩
61.
See Anonymous, “Public Notes on Railways,” Railway Gazette, January 8, 1932,
44–45. ↩
62.
Walter Ford (director), Bulldog Jack, UK 1935. VHS, 1994. ↩
63.
In Bulldog Jack the stock character of the serial happens to be impersonated by
another person pretending to be Bulldog Drummond while he is really Bulldog
“Jack.” ↩
64.
Bulldog Jack, Walter Ford et al., UK 1935. ↩
65.
See Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time
and Space in the 19th Century (1977; repr., Leamington Spa and New York:
Berg, 1986). ↩
66.
On the deliberate forgetting of passage, see Paul Virilio, The Aesthetics of
Disappearance (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009), 19–20. ↩
67.
Siegert, “Repräsentationen diskursiver Räume,” 10. See Vertesi, “Mind the
Gap,” 13–14, on the multitude of contemporary orientation practices with the
Tube Map. ↩
68.
German Police decrees of the 1920s also put emphasis on the synchronization
of individual and collective movement. See Dirk van Laak, “Just in Time: Zur
Theorie von Infrastruktur und Logistik,” in Versorgung und Entsorgung der
Moderne: Logistiken und Infrastrukturen der 1920er und 1930er Jahre, ed.
Wiebke Porombka, Heinz Reif, and Erhard Schütz (Frankfurt am Main et al.:
Peter Lang, 2011), 13–23, esp. 17. ↩
69.
On the poetology of the British grid, see James Purdon’s “Electric Cinema,

Pylon Poetry” in this issue of Amodern: http://amodern.net/article/electric-
cinema-pylon-poetry/ ↩
70.
See London County Council: Report on Electricity Supply, prepared by Merz &
McLellan, London 1914, app. 2, 37–38, and Thomas Parkes Hughes, Networks
of Power: Electrification in Western Society 1880–1930 (Baltimore and London:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 227. ↩
71.
Anonymous, “Electrical Development in England,” Electrical World 82 (1923):
1056. London encompassed 4.7 million inhabitants at that time. ↩
72.
On London Transport’s Lots Road power station, see Hughes, Networks of
Power, 232. See also Croome and Jackson, Rails through the Clay, 75, and
Elliman, “Signal Failure,” 167. London Transport therefore escaped the
complex problems of an electrical grid on a national scale. The hardly
computable synchronizations of the grid are what led Vannevar Bush to build
an analogue “network analyzer” computer at MIT. See Hughes, Networks of
Power, 376. ↩
73.
See the sketch for a “penny transport” in the Railway Gazette, March 25, 1932,
459–61. ↩
74.
See Railway Gazette, e.g., in the editions May 8 and 15, 1931. For a detailed
account, see Barker and Robbins, A History of London Transport, 272–73. ↩
75.
The first institutional annual report was published in 1934. See First Annual
Report and Statement of Accounts and Statistics for the Year ended 30 June
1934 (London Passenger Transport Board, 1934), London Transport Museum
Library, Quick Reference. In Berlin, Ernst Reuter managed to inaugurate a
similar organization as “Berliner Verkehrsbetriebe” (BVG) on January 1, 1929.
See Heinz Reif, “Verkehrsnetze und Großstadtentwicklung: Ernst Reuters und
Martin Wagners Vision der Weltstadt Berlin 1925 bis 1933,” in Versorgung und
Entsorgung der Moderne: Logistiken und Infrastrukturen der 1920er und
1930er Jahre, ed. Wiebke Porombka, Heinz Reif, and Erhard Schütz (Frankfurt
am Main et al.: Peter Lang, 2011), 53–71, esp. 56–57. ↩

76.
Here I am following a thesis put forth by Johannes Roskothen. See Roskothen,
Verkehr, 67. ↩
77.
Green, Underground Art, 78. ↩
78.
See Sebastian Gießmann, Die Verbundenheit der Dinge: Eine Kulturgeschichte
der Netze und Netzwerke (Berlin: Kadmos, 2014), http://prezi.com/-
txljg78gr_v/die-verbundenheit-der-dinge, and Sebastian Gießmann,
Netze und Netzwerke: Archäologie einer Kulturtechnik 1740–1840 (Bielefeld:
transcript, 2006). ↩
79.
See Mark Wigley, “Network Fever,” Grey Room 4 (2001): 82–122. ↩
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Amodern 2: Network Archaeology

HENRY CHARLES BECK, MATERIAL

We should not imagine Henry Charles Beck (1902–1974) as an unhappy person,

Fig. 1: Henry Charles Beck, first Tube Map sketch on

Amodern 2: Network Archaeology, October 2013

1. Henry Charles Beck Draws the Metropolis

If you’re going underground, why do you need to bother about

Amodern 2: Network Archaeology, October 2013

Fig. 2: Henry Charles Beck, Tube Map, January 1933. Color

Amodern 2: Network Archaeology, October 2013

The requested comments of London’s subway audience disappeared as part of oral

Fig. 3: Frederick H. Stingemore, Underground Railways of

Amodern 2: Network Archaeology, October 2013

Fig. 4: Henry Charles Beck, Underground “Straight Eight” All-

Amodern 2: Network Archaeology, October 2013

Airways airline that transferred Beck’s topological aesthetics to the connections of

Amodern 2: Network Archaeology, October 2013

Henry C. Beck’s map should be understood in the context of the following

1. The merger of the five independent, market-listed, constantly quarreling railroad

3. The movements of passengers in the station’s architectures, especially the

Amodern 2: Network Archaeology, October 2013

4. The ambitious attempt of spatiotemporal synchronization in the entire London

2. London Transport: Synchronization along the

— Charles Baudelaire, Tableaux Parisiens [27]

Scenario 1: Paper – Hand – Telephone

Amodern 2: Network Archaeology, October 2013

Scenario 2: Pneumatics – Levers – Electrical

Amodern 2: Network Archaeology, October 2013

Scenario 3: Paper – Clocks – Network Timing

Amodern 2: Network Archaeology, October 2013

Fig. 8: Revised timetable after interval changes on

Amodern 2: Network Archaeology, October 2013

Fig. 9: Headway clock monitoring the distance to the previous

Amodern 2: Network Archaeology, October 2013

Fig. 10: Headway chart recording the train frequency

3. London Transport: Synchronizing the Network

Amodern 2: Network Archaeology, October 2013

— Marc Augé [46]

Fig. 11: Automatic Train Recording Diagram for the

Amodern 2: Network Archaeology, October 2013

Tactics: Entering, Changing, Disembarking or

A different type of connection occurs where the Underground line crosses

Amodern 2: Network Archaeology, October 2013

Fig. 12: Unknown artist [D. Macpherson?], Piccadilly

Amodern 2: Network Archaeology, October 2013

Being part of a private-eye serial, Bulldog Jack presents an eight-minute, high-speed

Amodern 2: Network Archaeology, October 2013

Amodern 2: Network Archaeology, October 2013

Strategies: Synchronization as a Governmental

English railroads were always characterized by a multitude of independently run

Amodern 2: Network Archaeology, October 2013

Amodern 2: Network Archaeology, October 2013

Amodern 2: Network Archaeology, October 2013

Amodern 2: Network Archaeology, October 2013

Amodern 2: Network Archaeology, October 2013

Amodern 2: Network Archaeology, October 2013

Amodern 2: Network Archaeology, October 2013

Amodern 2: Network Archaeology, October 2013

Amodern 2: Network Archaeology, October 2013