“Rewriting the City: Reading Harry Beck’s Tube Map as a Form of Writing.” Politics of Place 1 (Summer 2013).
An enduring symbol of London and a milestone of graphic design, the London tube map cannot simply be called an emblem of the city, or a very useful source of information for tube travelers. Designed by an Underground engineering draughtsman named Harry C. Beck during a period of layoff in 1931, it has come to be the prototype of virtually any other map of rapid transit across the world. This article investigates how Beck’s map can be considered a form of rewriting the city, drawing on Jacques Derrida’s conception of the word in his science of grammatology. Starting from this analysis, the tube map is read as a proto-hypertext that simplified the geography of London in a way that we would now call digital, suggesting that it was thanks to these characteristics that the map proved popular among ordinary Underground users as well as designers all over the world. The analysis starts by focusing on the graphic evolution of the map to then consider how artworks and visual advertising used it as a language that could be adapted to the different messages at stake, whose syntactic rules were fixed and thus easily understandable by the reader.
Andrea Vesentini 