London Transport Museum

The London Transport Museum in Covent Garden, London, is housed in an 1871 Victorian flower market and displays over 500,000 items, including Harry Beck’s revolutionary 1931 Underground map design. Designed by William Rogers, the venue served as a flower market until 1971 before reopening as a museum on March 28, 1980. Its exhibits feature the only surviving 1860s steam engine that ran through early underground tunnels.

London · from the walk “London's Best-Kept Secrets” · audio ~3 min · Generated

London Transport Museum, Covent Garden Piazza, London WC2E 7BB

Who designed the famous London Underground map featured at the London Transport Museum?

Take a look at the elegant iron and glass building just across the piazza. That's the London Transport Museum... and it's hiding something extraordinary. This Victorian structure was designed as a dedicated flower market by William Rogers in eighteen seventy-one, and it was part of the Covent Garden vegetable, fruit, and flower market. For close to a century, it was the epicentre of London's wholesale flower industry — imagine this entire space overflowing with roses, lilies, and orchids, the air thick with perfume. The market moved out in nineteen seventy-one, and the building was reopened as the London Transport Museum on the twenty-eighth of March, nineteen eighty.......... Now, inside those walls is something that changed the world... and almost nobody got credit for it.......... Have you ever looked at a subway map... in Any city... and wondered who came up with that clever design? The answer is a man named Harry Beck. He'd been a draughtsman for the Underground since nineteen twenty-four, working his way up from the signalling department. Then he lost his job. During that spell out of work in nineteen thirty-one, he created a new diagrammatic design based on the sequence of stations and where lines intersect... rather than actual geography. He limited it to horizontal, vertical, and forty-five degree lines, magnifying the central area and compressing the outer reaches.......... Here's the twist. When Beck submitted his design to the publicity office in nineteen thirty-one... it was rejected. But after minor revisions, it was accepted a year later. In nineteen thirty-three, seven hundred and fifty thousand copies were printed — and riders Loved it. It's thought he was paid only five guineas for the original design — that's about five pounds and twenty-five pence.......... And the story gets darker. Beck tried to regain control of the map through threatening legal action, but in nineteen sixty-five he abandoned the attempt, bitter and betrayed. He died in nineteen seventy-four without proper recognition. It wasn't until nineteen ninety-seven that Beck's importance was posthumously recognized, and now the statement crediting his original nineteen thirty-one design is printed on every London Underground map.......... That design you see on every tube carriage, every station wall... it became the template for metro maps in Paris, New York, Tokyo, and hundreds of cities worldwide. The Bbc's Culture Show and London's Design Museum voted it the second-favourite British design of the twentieth century — beaten only by Concorde.......... And one more thing. The museum's collection runs to some half a million items. Inside, you can see the Only surviving eighteen-sixties steam engine that once ran through tunnels so choked with smoke that passengers reportedly grew their beards long... just to use them as makeshift air filters. Whether that's true or just a legend... well, I'll leave that to your imagination.

Nearby stories