Rethinking the definition of the word ‘map’: an evaluation of Beck's representation of the London Underground through a qualitative expert survey

Abstract

This paper reports on the results from a qualitative expert survey of members of the international geospatial community to elicit their view of Henry (Harry) Beck's iconic 1931 representation of the London Underground. It begins by providing a background to the publishing era when Beck's representation was developed under the ‘umbrella’ of the design style adopted by the London Passenger Transport Board to promote the image of ‘the new’ and contemporary Britain. It then outlines Beck's representation and his quest to develop a clearer and more understandable graphic information resource. This is followed by an overview of representative views from the design community about Beck's representation. Finally, it provides the results of research undertaken with an informed international cartographic community to determine whether they viewed the product as a map or a diagram. It is important to understand how Beck's representation is viewed from the perspective of the geospatial community. If it works as a map, albeit one where geography is generally abandoned, relative positions are favoured over the absolute and azimuth is distorted, then the view that successful (geo)communication artefacts must be linked to map designs that focus on precise and true representations of geographic information can be questioned.

Keywords:

• maps
• diagrams
• design

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank the anonymous reviewers who provided valuable feedback and suggestions, which have improved the paper.