Over the past year, London’s public transport systems have been through a lot! The Elizabeth Line arrived, and is now set to reach its final form within a matter of weeks. An express bus service was announced, called the Superloop – even though it doesn’t quite make a full loop around London. And plans were announced to rename the individual lines that make up the Overground. To bring it all into perspective, one transit fan on Twitter has released a reimagined Tube map that shines a little light on many of those developments.
The result is this gorgeous reimagined Tube map:
Byron Lee (@byronfromlee on Twitter) took the announcements about the Superloop and individual identities for the Overground and set out to make them easier to understand. To do so, Lee first overlaid the Superloop onto the Tube map. This is represented on the map in its 9 component routes. Then, the Overground was split up into its respective six lines. Each line receives its own identity with a new name and colour.
A later update of the map also ‘invented’ Ealing Broadway to corral some of the stops into one place.
A more readable map
What’s particularly striking is how vast an area the Superloop covers. The ease of navigating the Overground’s many twists and turns is also apparent. Lee mentions: “the untangled Overground network work wonders for readability, though the colors (from TfL 2015 trial) can be a bit dull.”
However, to make the map work visually, Byron Lee admits to some ‘cheating’. Lee also throws down the gauntlet to map viewers:
“Notice how busy the Acton-City arc has become when squeezing everything into a 1:1 circle, goes to show how the system is more ‘along’ than ‘across’ the River Thames. That said, the abstraction could have been better executed – see if you can catch where I ‘cheated’ on the map.”
See the full thing (and zoom in to find the ‘cheating’) here.
Despite the official-looking design of the map, it should be noted that this is not an official map. To see the current London public transport maps, head to the official TfL website.