New tube stations means a new tube map.
And here it is.
It's not in all tube stations yet - it was only intwo of the twelve I tried yesterday - but it is out just in time for the first Northern line trains departing Battersea Power Station station this morning.
The new extension was first revealed in a tweet by the Mayor on Friday morning.
That got London talking.
The first thing that stood out was that the extension wasn't straight. It could have been, had the designers chosen to write 'Battersea Power Station' underneath rather than alongside, but they chose not to. Nowhere else on the map is there a bend quite as curvaceous as this, except perhaps on the Heathrow T4 loop, so it really stands out.
This isn't necessarily wrong, just deeply unfamiliar, nor does it appear to be an attempt to reflect geographical reality. However it has inspired several people to suggest renaming the extension the Battersea Droop, a nickname with every chance of catching on, so this might turn out to be a design decision that backfires.
Other things to note...
» Kennington has gained a connector blob to show that only trains on the Charing Cross branch will serve the new extension. But it's a massive connector blob, almost as big as Farringdon and Blackfriars now suffer, which is particularly unhelpful given that Kennington has one of the simplest interchanges on the network - simply stepping through from one Northern line platform to the other.
» On the previous version of the tube map it looked like all trains on the Charing Cross branch continued down to Morden. On this version it looks like no trains on the Charing Cross branch continue down to Morden. In fact some still will still connect during peak hours, as before, so the designers have chosen to show exactly the same thing in a completely different way.
» Battersea Power Station station is within 500m of an Overground station, something that'd normally be depicted with a dotted line. However that Overground station is Battersea Park which is served by just three orange trains a day, and maybe today's extension explains why TfL have never chosen to include it on the tube map.
» The Battersea Power Station development has its own river pier but Battersea Power Station station doesn't have a river symbol. The symbol appears on the enamel diagrams going up in tube stations, which have a much longer lifespan than a paper map, but not here. In fact the pier is only 500m from the station, which suggests it should appear, but the current walking route around the BPS building site is a tortuous 900m so maybe that's why it doesn't.
And then of course there's the rejigged Z1 boundary.
Boris's decision to place Battersea Power Station and Nine Elms in Zone 1 was always going to be difficult to depict on the map, and so it's proven, but I'm chuffed that the chosen solution looks very much as I predicted back in May. That's because the only practical way to depict the correct zone boundary has been to drag Vauxhall away from the Thames to the wrong side of the new extension. This might have been ignorable were it not for TfL's questionable decision in 2019 to show river piers separately on the tube map, which means a dotted line continues north to the riverside creating additional cluttered map-faff.
The other significant change on the new tube map is the appearance of several new step-free stations. There ought to be eleven, because eleven stations have gone step-free since the last paper map was published, but only nine have actually appeared. One omission is Hayes and Harlington because that only went step-free last week and paper maps have awkward print deadlines, but the other is Debden and that went step-free five months ago. The digital map on the TfL website correctly shows Debden as step-free, so I suspect its unblobbiness on the paper map may be a genuine proofing error. One to check, anyway.
The artwork on the front cover of the new tube map hasn't gone down especially well. It's essentially a solid black rectangle, so visually drab, with just six small white words written within. These words say "sit... alongside... and... feel me... breathe" and that's got a lot of people scratching their heads, if not somewhat appalled. "Sorry, but WHAT? Aren't we still embroiled in a pandemic?" chuntered Philip on Twitter, gaining 19 likes. In fact if you read the rationale on the Art On The Underground website "the work questions how we can regain the fundamental principles of our social engagement with strangers as we begin to reinhabit shared spaces", so it's provocatively deliberate, but I expect Philip's partially-informed reaction will be a common one.
Here's the extension's first appearance on the Rail & Tube map.
This doesn't have the tube map's bell-end droop, but it has required four bends to wiggle the NLE extension to the north of Vauxhall. Meanwhile the mainline between Waterloo and Clapham Junction used to have just one bend but now it has five. The more lines you squeeze onto a map, the muddlier they get.
As for the line diagrams inside Northern line carriages, these started to be updated earlier this month.
I've yet to hear anyone offer a positive comment about this design. For a start bending in towards Kennington and then back out towards Nine Elms isn't elegant. Also the peak hours connection between the two branches has been shown this time, and for some reason it's been given the less kinky alignment. But the properly awkward issue is that trains between Kennington and Oval are shown passing through Zone 1 which in real life they don't. Perhaps the designers assumed passengers would only look at the stations rather than the gaps between them, and it is really tricky to depict the correct zonal situation on a long thin diagram, but the end result comes across as a bit of a bodge.
Finally the line diagrams alongside Northern line platforms have been replaced, and the fresh tranche has been a partial production disaster. Last month Geoff Marshall photographed a sign at Golders Green where the two extra stations had somehow been written in the wrong order, i.e. with Nine Elms at the end of the line! And then yesterday he tweeted this howler from Tooting Broadway.
Inexplicably the name of the terminus station had been written as Power Station Battersea, which is jawdropping. Astonishingly exactly the same error had been repeated at Tooting Bec, Balham, Clapham South and Clapham Common, and perhaps elsewhere, which is incomprehensible. Don't rush along hoping to see these particular errors today because they were swiftly covered up. But how appalling does an organisation's quality control have to be to manufacture AND install such flawed diagrams without anybody noticing? If you're off to enjoy the new extension today, keep your eyes peeled.
