notes.husk.org. scribblings by Paul Mison.

It turns out that Andrew Godwin has coded a 3d visualisation of several London Underground stations, including King’s Cross St Pancras.

If you’re having trouble wrapping your head around the station diagram, you could find being able to turn the thing around and refocus on different platforms useful.

From The history of the Tube in pictures: 150 years of London Underground at the Telegraph:

8 March 1939: Some of the four million tickets collected from London Underground passengers are examined in a survey by London Transport to discover the most and least used routes to help future infrastructure development.

Nowadays, all they need to do is crunch the numbers from the automatic ticket machines to produce lists like this.

Picture: Gerry Cranham/Fox Photos/Getty Images. Link via Paul Clarke via Michael Smethurst.

In addition to the six stamps commemorating the London Underground itself, there’s a series of four reproducing three classic posters each. As Creative Review quotes:

“There’s a wealth of beautiful posters to choose from [in the TFL archive] so it was difficult to choose just four in total,” says NB’s Nick Finney. “So, we played with multiple posters in a row across a longer format horizontal stamp. We wanted to evoke posters being displayed in the tunnel of the underground station (the modern train speeding past) and the windows of a carriage.”

IanVisits notes that the Metropolitan line is not the only part of Underground history to have an anniversary this month:

… at some point in January 1933 London Transport printed 700,000 copies of its latest map leaflet, and sparked a revolution.

This was the first mass print-run of Harry Beck’s iconic tube map design — although it is not technically a map, and neither was it the first time such a design had been seen.

The post goes on to point out some of Beck’s inspirations, but the map remains a fantastic (and resonant) piece of design.

A first day cover of Royal Mail stamps commemorating the 150th anniversary of the opening of Metropolitan line.

There’s more on the designs at the Creative Review blog, including this quote from Gareth Howat of Hat-Trick, the designers:

Our approach was to deliberately use a mix of photography, graphic art and illustration as it’s such a rich visual subject. The only one that was commissioned was the shot of Canary Wharf, which was shot by Paul Grundy, the rest are originals, some of which we had to enhance slightly.

Google UK’s doodle noting the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the opening of the Metropolitan line, the first component of the London Underground, which was itself the first underground / city-scale railway in the world.

Previously: LU150 two pound coins.

The Royal Mint’s London Underground £2 coin gift set:

On 10 January 1863 the world’s first underground railway opened in London. An engineering triumph, the 150^thanniversary is being marked with not one but two new UK £2 coins for 2013.

The ‘Roundel’ £2 coin is inspired by the 1938 poster by Man Ray and depicts the world-famous London Underground logo, while the ‘Train’ £2 coin shows a Tube train hurtling out of a tunnel. Presented in a specially designed pack based on the iconic Tube map, no other memorabilia captures the spirit of London so well.

(Source: royalmint.com)

Three books by Capital Transport Publishing on the history of London’s underground maps: No Need To Ask by David Leboff & Tim Demuth, Mr Beck’s Underground Map by Ken Garland, and Underground Maps After Beck by Maxwell J Roberts.

Taken together, the three cover over a hundred years of maps of the Underground, from the different companies in the early part of the 1900s, through the pivotal 1933 Harry Beck diagram, and to the present day. The writers are all well qualified (Tim Demuth, co-author of No Need To Ask, designed the London Railways map of the 1970s; Ken Garland is a respected designer and writer; while Maxwell Roberts has designed his own maps aided by his primary study of cognition) and, despite some overlaps between the books, generally they cover the story very well.

Probably the most interesting is the middle volume, covering both the route to the Beck diagram, his many variations over the years as lines were extended (and management meddled), and the nearly decade-long fight to keep designing the map in the early 1960s. The book includes the worst diagram since 1933, the Hutchinson design, and a first look at the Garbutt diagram that came to succeed it.

The Garbutt diagram and its slow evolution (as opposed to the Cambrian explosion of variations that Beck produced) is at the heart of the final book, which I think I enjoyed more than many would; the story is one of subtle change, livened mainly by the changing landscape of the system (with the Victoria, Jubilee, and DLR lines expanding the scope of the map).

Overall, I’d recommend Garland’s book on Beck’s diagrams to anyone with even a passing interest in the Underground and mapmaking. Roberts is more for the completist, while those looking for history and more decorative design may enjoy No Need To Ask.