Why? by Mark Ovenden

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One question most writers get asked is; “How did you come up with the idea for your book?” Considering my offering is a collection of other people’s maps I can’t help but feel a slight tinge of embarrassment about this line of enquiry. I always want to remind people that I’m enormously grateful to the many thousands of cartographers and designers who’ve slaved away crafting and re-drawing their maps of the world’s subway systems. It was these people; and specifically a man called Paul E. Garbutt who must have had the earliest influence over my spark of interest in the subject.

For it was he who was responsible for re-drawing the classic maps of one of the worlds most celebrated designers, in the era when I would have become aware of them the first time; the mid 1960’s.

At this time I was a somewhat annoying and fidgety child being brought up by incredibly tolerant and liberal parents in West London. Most weeks, my mother would painstakingly haul my smaller sister and I on a tortuous journey across fields (yes we had real fields in the outskirts of London), to the breezy stop of the number 140 bus (which never seemed to arrive until we threatened the invisible vehicle that we’d walk off) and eventually down clunky escalators onto the London Undergrounds’ Central Line at fifties style ‘Northolt’ station.

The journey was doubtless punctuated with tantrums, misbehavior and claims of boredom and I distinctly recall my Mum would try and distract me from annoying the other passengers by thrusting into my little four or five year old hands the nearest inoffensive thing available; the “Tube Map”. Little was anyone to know that such early innocent gazings would turn into first a fascination, then a collection, then much research and finally a book; which most certainly has changed my life….and had a small effect as well on said Mr Garbutt. .

After many hours staring at the diagram the first thing that an inquisitive child might ask is “why does it seem to take longer to go what looks like the same distance”? Here was one of the great feats of a design that was first tried in the 1930’s by a certain Mr Harry Beck. I can clearly remember being gripped when my Dad tried to explain that the little diagram wasn’t entirely telling the truth about where things were! On the London Tube map at least, geography is distorted; in order to make all the far-flung, spread-out suburban stations fit in, they are squashed closer together than they really are, while at the same time the space between stations in the central area is stretched. This makes the whole thing is easier to read.

From then on I was hooked! I would start asking more and more questions about the diagram – answers to some of which are in the Londoners psyche (they know when it’s quicker to walk than go all the round by Underground), others would be revealed by my patient if annoying enquires. By the age of six or seven I had a fair collection of older, dog-eared London Underground maps, starting naturally with the most recent. However some of these were so different from the one I had become used to that it served only to fuel my interest further.

The version that was found in diaries and handbags from 1960 till 1964 was, it tuned out, the first major revision of the map for thirty years. It had been prepared by a Mr Harold Hutchinson. His offering first mystified me….then I appear to have been somewhat affronted by it! Station names were broken in half because they didn’t fit (Aldgate), odd kinks in the lines seemed to be there for no reason (West Brompton to Fulham Broadway), and the balance of clarity of Mr Garbutts design seemed a work of art compared to this jagged thing. Mr Hutchinson had been handed a somewhat poisoned chalice. He was charged with “modernizing” what was both effective and cherished, putting one in mind of that oft quoted line about not fixing things that are “not broken”. Gradually after raiding old aunties’ drawers and rooting through piles of old grandparents’ papers, I found older maps. One from the 1940’s seemed light and airy compared to the modern things. Another from the mid 1950’s lacked almost any diagonals. These were from Harry Beck’s years of experimentation. Eventually my Grandad handed me a thin cloth-bound green card. Inside was the London Underground map of 1925. It had no perpendicular or horizontal lines – resembling a bag of knotted together wool or multi-colored spaghetti on a plate. This was the design that pre-dated Beck’s iconic 1930’s diagram. Eagerly I went off to libraries while other boys were out playing aggressive street games to find out more. Even completing a “project” (a scrapbook full of bits cut out from magazines mainly) on the building of the London Underground, by the age of seven!

When a worldly uncle asked where I was on a sunny day – probably around 1972 when I was about eight or nine - Mum told him that I was up in my room “drawing underground maps”. The uncle arrived to find me happily doodling new fantasy extensions onto spare copies of London Underground diagrams from my collections. “Have you seen the New York Subway map”? he asked as he bowled into my silent scribblings.

Without the internet or even such copious saturation of American TV, I’d barely stopped to think much about the possibility of any subways outside my home city, but sure enough on his next visit he brought me a New York Subway map. Its similarity to that of London immediately struck me and it became a wall poster in my room for many years. This was the large fold-out Massimo Vignelli map; a colorful and highly diagrammatic version of the massively complex Subway.

Not long after that I acquired a little card folder of the Paris Metro (which seemed highly un-organized to my mind) and shortly after that a map of the Merseyrail electric train services of Liverpool (another neat pocket diagram). A childhood interest was beginning to turn into a full-on hobby. I started experimenting with creating other complete fantasy maps – one for Milton Keynes (a British new town which had no public transport at all) and the northern industrial cities of Liverpool and Manchester (neither of which I’d visited, though after weeks pouring over old road maps I could name as many suburbs of Lancashire than I could of nearby towns to the more rural area I was then living in!

Age 15 I attempted in art class to put back a degree of geographical accuracy to the London map while retaining those classic 45 degree angles. The resulting mess made me realize why Beck and others were forced to relinquish geographic accuracy for cartographic legibility, but with the support of far-sighted art teachers, I submitted the painting to the local Art College and it helped me get a place on their Graphic Design course.

By the time I left school I had urban rail maps from Barcelona, Madrid, San Francisco, Moscow and several German cities. Though I put them slightly to one side and began a rather mixed career in journalism, radio production, TV and music….the little collection progressively grew as I was lucky enough to travel further afield and other people brought me back gifts from far flung cities.

Come the turn of the century after twenty years in the back seat, I noticed myself becoming more and more attracted to the now quite large and international looking collection. Friends who knew of my odd box of maps would often ask to borrow one if they were going to Chicago or Bilbao or Montreal….and I began wondering why there was nowhere these things were all available in one place. Even the internet did not seem to offer the answers. It was one day when I was working at MTV that a colleague had heard me shout out for the umpteenth time that so-and-so’s pop video was set on this-or-that-subway that he said to me: “if you think you know so much about this why don’t you write a bloody book on it!”

The idea grew. And in the next edition of this blog I’ll explain how I went about finding the official subway maps to over 150 cities…..and how we managed to get clearance to reproduce them all in one book!

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Mark Ovenden

Transit Maps of the World

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