page_title: Tube map
section_title: Early maps
hierarchical_section_title: Tube map / History / Early maps
caption_attribution_description: London Underground map from 1908
context_page_description: The Tube map is a schematic transport map of the lines, stations and services of the London Underground, known colloquially as "the Tube", hence the map's name. The first schematic Tube map was designed by Harry Beck in 1931. Since then, it has been expanded to include more of London's public transport systems, including the Docklands Light Railway, London Overground, TfL Rail, Tramlink and the Emirates Air Line cable car.
  As a schematic diagram, it shows not the geographic locations but the relative positions of the stations, lines, the stations' connective relations and fare zones. The basic design concepts have been widely adopted for other such maps around the world and for maps of other sorts of transport networks and even conceptual schematics.
  A regularly-updated version of the map is available from the official Transport for London website. In 2006, the tube map was voted one of Britain's top 10 design icons which included Concorde, Mini, Supermarine Spitfire, K2 telephone box, World Wide Web and the AEC Routemaster bus.
context_section_description: As London's early transport system was operated by a variety of independent companies, there were no complete maps of the network, just for the individual companies' routes. The maps were not typically schematic and were simply the line overlaid on a regular city map. There was no integration of the companies' services or any co-operation in advertising.
  In 1907, The Evening News commissioned a pocket map, The Evening News London "Tube Map". It was the first map to show all of the lines with equal weight being given to each line, and it was the first map to use a different colour for each line.
  Another early combined map was published in 1908 by the Underground Electric Railways Company of London (UERL) in conjunction with four other underground railway companies that used the "Underground" brand as part of a common advertising factor.
  The map showed eight routes – four operated by the UERL and one from each of the other four companies:
  UERL lines:
  Bakerloo Railway – brown
  Hampstead Railway – indigo
  Piccadilly Railway – yellow
  District Railway – green
  Other lines:
  Central London Railway – blue
  City and South London Railway – black
  Great Northern and City Railway – orange
  Metropolitan Railway – red
  A geographical map presented restrictions since for sufficient clarity of detail in the crowded central area of the map required the extremities of the District and Metropolitan lines to be omitted and so a full network diagram was not provided. The problem of truncation remained for nearly half a century. Although all of the western branches of the District and Piccadilly lines were included for the first time in 1933 with Harry Beck's first proper Tube map, the portion of the Metropolitan line beyond Rickmansworth did not appear until 1938, and the eastern end of the District line did not appear until the mid-1950s.
  The route map continued to be developed and was issued in various formats and artistic styles until 1920, when, for the first time, the geographic background detail was omitted in a map designed by MacDonald Gill. That freed the design to enable greater flexibility in the positioning of lines and stations. The routes became more stylised but the arrangement remained, largely, geographic in nature. The 1932 edition was the last geographic map to be published before Beck's diagrammatic map was introduced.
caption: Map of underground lines, 1908
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