Sleep Spent

I visited the London Transport Museum today, which is just what it sounds like: an examination of ways Londoners have gotten around their city from 1820 to today. I really liked the exhibits, although I was at first afraid that everything would be geared too much toward children. Certainly there were a lot of kids about, but the exhibits themselves did a good job of being both fun (with tons of “press this button to make the [noun] [verb]” bits) and at the same time interesting (did you know that the recently extended Jubilee line is now the only tube line that touches all the other lines? Neither did I).

There was a whole room devoted to maps. The evolution of the tube map was explored, as well as the terrible difficulty of making an accurate map of the sprawling bus system, even as long ago as the 1920s. An interesting point was that, while one could see the busses move along their routes, the tube required a usable map much sooner because it is almost entirely out of sight beneath the city.

Speaking of maps, I hadn’t fully appreciated Harry Beck’s iconic tube map until today. I knew I liked it, but I wasn’t really sure why. If you take a look, you’ll notice a few key features:

• Most stations are denoted by small rectangles jutting out from the line itself, while interchange stations are denoted by one or more black circles. This leads to a very clean look, with a minimum of symbols.
• Aside from the little station pips, there are no hard angles on the map. Every change in direction of a line is accomplished by means of a curve.
• The most important bit is that there are only four orientations of lines on the map: 0°, 45°, 90° and 135°. This makes for a visually appealing flow of lines, as every line is parallel to another.

Once Beck had thrown out the idea that the tube map needed to reflect the relative distances of the stations, he was free to do what looked attractive instead. And boy, did he succeed.

Like all good museums, this one had a bookshop at the end. I was hard-pressed to not spend any money there, what with about 5000 × 10^-2 books on the tube alone to choose from. Through a demonstration of tremendous personal restraint, I didn’t buy any of them. I didn’t even buy the £9.95 poster of the current tube map. (I’ll see if I have any money left at the end of my trip. [Yeah, right.])

This evening’s plans: actually write part of the Shakespeare essay (no, really) and perhaps join some of the downstairs Poly crew for a special Halloween edition of a Night on the Town. That last part is likely to involve drinking, so we’ll see how long I last.