I always keep my eyes peeled for a new tube map, even when one isn't scheduled. So I was surprised to see a cover I'd never seen before in the rack at Bow Road station yesterday morning. It was mostly black, and they don't make tube maps with mostly-black covers so I thought that was odd. I wondered if it might be a new night tube map, although they haven't printed one of those since 2018. So I picked up a copy, indeed I picked up two, and that turned out to be all the copies there were.
The design on the front cover was a photo of tracks in a dark tunnel, maybe close to a station, with the edge of a blurred face on the lefthand side. There was with a quote at the bottom.
"There is nothing artistic about what you do"
Judge Peter Clarke QC
It was printed on thicker paper than usual, so that was immediately suspicious. And the biggest clue was the date on the cover, which didn't say October 2023 like you might have expected, it said TOX23.
TOX is a graffiti artist, or profligate tagger, real name Daniel Halpin. He's been leaving his tag all over the tube network (and all over London) for many years, scrawling TOX plus the last two digits of the year on walls and surfaces of all kinds. When it was 2004 he wrote TOX04, when he got arrested in 2011 it had been TOX11 and this year it's TOX23. It's fair to say Judge Peter Clarke QC was no great fan, sentencing him to 27 months in custody much to TfL's delight. But that didn't stop him tagging ubiquitously after he got out, and neither have fences, razor wire, CCTV, live rails, security patrols or seeming inaccessibility. As one London Underground manager once said, "I don't know where you can't see a TOX tag – they are in places even I don't know how to access."
And now he's making tube maps.
Unfolding my copy I found a very different design - eleven coloured lines spray-painted on top of each other and left to drip. The Circle line's on top, having been painted last, and I think either the Metropolitan or Northern line went down first. It's an impractical mess, but simultaneously far less cluttered than the usual version - an attempt at a work of art.
A TOX23 tag is included, confirming authenticity, and underneath that an extremely cheeky use of the Art on the Underground logo. The most provocative message is in the bottom right hand corner:
To see more work by the artist,
take the tube.
I like the index, which across two panels lists all 272 tube stations in a font size large enough to actually read, with no additional faff like step-free cycle-parking toilets. Other lines are also summarily ignored, along with the footnote *DLR, Overground and Elizabeth Line don't exist. Many tube map purists might agree.
You might have seen the original TOX23 tube map canvas at the Beyond The Streets exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery earlier in the year. Its official title is Underground (Analogue) and it was also available as a limited edition print (officially an "11 colour, layered archival enamel ink screenprint"). All 100 copies are now sold out, which at £300 a time will have been a nice little earner. One of these prints recently sold for £1792 at Bonhams.
And I picked up my map for nothing. Keep your eyes peeled.
