An exhibition of tube maps, dozens and dozens of them, is pretty much nirvana for some people. If this is you be sure to make a pilgrimage to The Map House (nearest station Knightsbridge) before the end of the month. Look for the gold tube map in the window, just round the corner from Harrods.
To be fair it's more a sale in a shop professionally displayed, but I've never seen a collection of tube maps quite as varied as this nor do I expect to again. There are some cracking old maps in the opening gallery, mainly from the era when people drew red lines on existing street maps and everything was geographically pure. I never realised there'd been dotted-line plans to build a railway across the Thames alongside Hammersmith Bridge, for example, and to run it all the way down to Barnes. These maps are large framed beauties, and if you read to the bottom of the highly informative label it's not uncommon for the price to end in two or even three zeros. Flick through the catalogue if you want to see what I mean.
The maps continue down the little stairs and along the little corridor, proper big posters with long-abandoned geometric formats and unfamiliar line colours. But the real treasure trove is perhaps the back room where the post-Beck tube map is celebrated in all its many topological glories. One wall is a chronological run through from 1933, the evolution of rationales plain to see, including a little inward cheer when Harry Beck wrests control back from alternative designers. A proof version of his very first map is included in the display, annotated with suggestions and corrections (you forgot the Watford branch, Waterloo should be red), also a quartet of much later pencil and paper sketches of interchanges as he attempted to squeeze the Victoria line through. Some of the poster-sized maps are so rare that, as the label proudly mentions, not even the London Transport Museum has this one.
Not everything's official, so for example a couple of Max Roberts' circular tube maps gleam in the hallway. But almost everything's up for sale, a little red sticker showing which are already being taken away by a new owner at the end of the exhibition. Rifling through a set of contemporary trifolds I was surprised to see that even a 2022 tube map, which you could have picked up in multitudes for absolutely nothing, is selling for as much as £35. So best just look and admire, and perhaps covet, and do it quickly because you'll never see the like together again. [until 30 November, from 10.30am, not Sunday]
