It's got worse. The tube map, I mean. London's once great topographic design icon has been getting steadily uglier and more impractical over the last few years, and the latest version is grimmer still. Where will it end, I wonder?
You won't find the new tube map at your local station just yet. TfL will probably be waiting a week or so until the new batch of Shepherd's Bush stations open before unleashing their latest creation upon an unsuspecting public. By the end of the month I suspect there'll be no escaping it. But for the time being you'll only find central chunks of the new map at select updated locations, like the prototype S-stock tube carriage in Euston Gardens. That's where Mackenzie and his camera spotted it, and you might like to have his Flickr set open as I go through the following.
Let's start in W12 with the Underground network's latest stations [map close-up]. Look, there's Wood Lane, which is the first new tube station to be built on an existing line for umpteen years. And there's Shepherd's Bush Market, which used to be plain ordinary Shepherd's Bush until some big cheese decided to rename it after a few stallholders selling cut price tea towels and cleaning products. You'll notice that the former station is wheelchair accessible, and the latter really really isn't (unless you like bouncing uncontrollably down a steep flight of steps). Then there's the fresh duo of Shepherd's Bush stations, one just opened on the Overground after a long-delayed catalogue of woeful construction errors, the other on the Central line about to reopen in barely recognisable form. On the tube map, this entire area is now a barely discernible spectacle in orange and pink.
There are two particular uglinesses I'd like you to note. One is the appearance of diagonal distances to indicate how far it is to walk between pairs of stations. Squint carefully, the text is just about legible at this magnification. The two Shepherd's Bush stations are a mere 100m apart, but this information is apparently worthy of prioritisation on the map. Presumably there are Underground users for whom 100m at ground level across a flat road is an unsurmountable travel obstacle and who need to be warned about this sort of thing, but quite frankly there can't be many. The tube map doesn't warn these passengers that the interchange at Green Park is a lengthy subterranean assault course, or that Bank to Monument is a multi-level semi-shut mountain trek. But White City to Wood Lane, a nice level 250m along the pavement opposite BBC Television Centre, that's apparently also worthy of inclusion. There is no consistency on the tube map, not at all.
And ugliness two is the inconsistent use of interchange symbols. White City didn't used to be an interchange, but a fresh black circle announces that it is now. Change here for Wood Lane... except Wood Lane isn't shown as an interchange. A blue wheelchair blob trumps a black interchange circle, so it's impossible to tell whether a wheelchair blob is an interchange at all. Ditto at Nu-Shepherd's Bush. Could this interchange possibly be depicted in an uglier manner? A doubled-up station name squished into miniature diagonal measurement alongside a nigh-irrelevant British Rail symbol. Would it really have been so terrible to use just one station blob here, or at least to have positioned the two blobs more obviously closer together? This feeble attempt at incorporating distance merely makes the overall information less distinct.
OK, let's head east to Blackfriars [map close-up]. This station's being upgraded and closed for two years, and the new tube map duly mentions this in very tiny writing. But Blackfriars isn't closing until March 2009, so its removal doesn't affect anyone's travel plans for at least five months. Never mind - a premature information campaign is deemed more important than everyday clarity.
And then there's the former East London line [map close-up]. The map design team have finally admitted that the replacement bus service looked far too complex, and have straightened out the former dotted orange wiggle to create something slightly simpler. But not at Rotherhithe [map close-up]. Look how complicated this now-closed station has become. The 381 has become the first ordinary bus route to appear on the tube map, and it's caused this part of riverside London to be displayed in a desperately complicated manner. Canada Water has become an undue mess of step-free stations and step-free buses (except, ludicrously, the buses aren't shown as step-free because a blue blob can only refer to a station). And does Rotherhithe really merit this tangled web? Before it closed this was one of the least used stations on the entire tube network, and located so close to Canada Water that most people could walk there quicker than any bus could drive. But the tube map ignores this practicality in favour of the area's handful of mobility impaired tube travellers - a restricted geographical minority if ever there was one.
Stuff simplicity, it seems TfL now chooses to cater for whichever rail users they deem are deserving of inclusion and 'equality'. Their tube map is optimised for a chosen minority of wheel-bound passengers, rather than the majority of us seeking a broad overview of how to get from here to there. This increasingly complex diagram, crammed onto a tiny rectangular sheet of card measuring 21 centimetres by 14, is no longer visually accessible unless you have eagle-quality eyesight. And as for the 4% of Britons who suffer from colour blindness and can't tell their Central from their H&C, sorry, you're not TfL's disabled minority of choice either, so you're buggered. It's all so woefully ugly, and ill-thought-through, and over-complicated, and desperately inconsistent.
For an in-depth critique of recent tube maps you might like to pop over to Max Roberts' webpage on Information Pollution. Or head down to your local tube station and pick up your own copy of the March 2008 map, the one with a target on the cover and an IKEA ad on the back. Quick, before TfL replaces it and pulps the lot. It may be an impractical design but it's not quite as bad as this new one, or the next one, or the next one. Sorry, but there's no going back to the clean clear lines of the past, and the future can only be uglier still.
Let's start in W12 with the Underground network's latest stations [map close-up]. Look, there's Wood Lane, which is the first new tube station to be built on an existing line for umpteen years. And there's Shepherd's Bush Market, which used to be plain ordinary Shepherd's Bush until some big cheese decided to rename it after a few stallholders selling cut price tea towels and cleaning products. You'll notice that the former station is wheelchair accessible, and the latter really really isn't (unless you like bouncing uncontrollably down a steep flight of steps). Then there's the fresh duo of Shepherd's Bush stations, one just opened on the Overground after a long-delayed catalogue of woeful construction errors, the other on the Central line about to reopen in barely recognisable form. On the tube map, this entire area is now a barely discernible spectacle in orange and pink.
