A piece of London's transport history is set to go under the hammer, with a rare 1932 draft of the iconic Tube map created by Harry Beck expected to fetch an impressive £100,000 at Christie's auction house.
The Revolutionary Design
This extraordinary artefact, dated to 1932, represents the pioneering work of Harry Beck, an electrical draughtsman from Essex who conceived his revolutionary design while unemployed after being laid off by the Underground Electric Railways Company of London. The draft features handwritten annotations from both Beck and Frederick Stingemore, who had designed London Underground maps between 1926 and 1932.
Beck's radical approach abandoned traditional rules of scale and geometric accuracy, creating what Christie's describes as "an iconic and highly influential Underground map". His innovative use of only straight lines and 45-degree angles transformed how Londoners and visitors navigated the sprawling network, setting a benchmark for every official Tube map that followed.
A Glimpse into London's Past
Eagle-eyed observers will notice several station names that have either disappeared entirely or been renamed. The map features British Museum station in Holborn, which closed in 1933 and later served as a World War II air raid shelter, and Brompton Road between Knightsbridge and South Kensington, which closed in 1934.
Other 'ghost stations' visible on this historic document include Mark Lane, closed in 1967, and Marlborough Road, which ceased operation in 1939 and now functions as a power station. Familiar names appear in different forms too – what we now know as Queensway was Queen's Road, St Paul's was Post Office, Fulham Broadway was Walham Green, and Green Park was Dover Street.
The network depicted consists of what we would recognise today as the District Railway (green), Bakerloo Line (red), Piccadilly Line (light blue), Central London Railway (orange), Edgware, Highgate and Morden Line (black), and the historic Metropolitan Railway (purple) – the world's first underground passenger railway that opened in 1863, initially linking Paddington with Farringdon.
From Rejection to Icon
Incredibly, Beck's design was initially rejected by London Transport's publicity department for being too radical. However, a successful trial print-run demonstrated its immediate popularity with the public, leading to its official publication in 1933.
Transport for London notes that "the result was an instantly clear and comprehensible chart that would become an essential guide to London and a template for transport maps the world over". Beck's design philosophy is thought to have been influenced by his experience creating electrical circuit schematics.
This rare draft is dated to the year before Beck's reworked tube map was released to the public, at a time when the London tube system had already been operating for 69 years. It will be included in Christie's live auction event 'Groundbreakers: Icons of our Time', taking place on December 11, where it is expected to achieve the six-figure sum of £100,000.
