Harold Frederick Hutchison (1900-1975) is the man who sacked Harry Beck in 1960 and replaced Beck’s London Underground map with his own. He was London Transport’s Publicity Officer from 1947 to 1966, and he falls into a distinct category of London Underground map-makers who designed the map in their spare time because they thought they could improve on the existing one. In Harold Hutchison’s case the critics were not kind. Beck oversaw most iterations of his diagram for thirty years; Hutchison’s map lasted for three.
Hutchison’s first edition of his map was issued in poster form on January 1960 while his replacement was unveiled to the world (including Beck) in April of the same year.
As far as the design itself goes, the best word I can find for Hutchison’s map is ‘spiky’: there isn’t a curve in sight. He also made some unusual choices regarding spacing (e.g. the location of Great Portland Street) and splitting station names (e.g. Ald-gate, on either side of the line). His successor Paul Garbutt believed he had ‘rescued’ the London Underground map from the clutches of Harold Hutchison, and his ‘ham-fisted parody’ of Beck’s designs, Garbutt’s basic configuration proved extremely durable and he designed the map for the next twenty years. However, Hutchison made three fundamental and lasting changes to the map:
- He differentiated between interchanges with other Underground lines (a circle) and interchanges between the Underground and mainline services (a square).
- He used Upper and Lower case letters for the first time, making station names easier to read and adding emphasis to interchange stations, which were still capitalised.
- Most significantly, he sought to make his own map more relevant to what was going on above ground. His principal objection to the later versions of Beck’s design was that an increasing reliance on 90  degree angles alone had made the map too abstract; for example, from 1954 all Beck’s maps show both northern branches of the Northern Line pointing due north, whereas in reality they veer northwest. Hutchison tried to remedy this on his map, and he had a point: not one of his successors has returned to Beck’s final vision of horizontal and vertical lines set at 90 degree angles to one another, with as few 45 degree diagonals as possible.
Regarding the first two points, Hutchison was permitted to make those changes and Beck, apparently, was not, but he evidently made a more persuasive case for them. As for the third, I’ve seen no indication that Beck had any intention of departing from his rectilinear design.
Hutchison’s reputation has also been coloured by the circumstances in which he set about replacing Beck’s design with his own. Beck was freelance by this time, and is alleged to have had no inkling that his services were about to be summarily dispensed with until Hutchison’s design was unveiled to the public in April 1960. According to some accounts, he saw it for the first time when journeying by Underground himself. Understandably bitter, he threatened legal action to recover control of ‘his’ map, but never designed another official map for the Underground again. Beck preserved Hutchison’s replies to his correspondence in a scrapbook which is now in the London Transport Museum, and the tone is curt: very much ‘if we need any more from you Mr Beck, we’ll ask for it’. To all appearances Beck was treated shabbily, but I do feel that there is more to this story than meets the eye. If these are the facts of the matter, how and why was the new map prepared by a major publicly-owned organisation in conditions of absolute secrecy? Was Hutchison acting unilaterally, under instruction, or as the prime instigator but with broader support within London Transport? Why had relations between Beck and Hutchison deteriorated to such an extent that communication was impossible?
Henry (Harry) Charles Beck (1902 – 1974), was an English technical draughtsman best known for creating the present London Underground Tube map in 1931.Beck drew up the diagram in his spare time while working as an engineering draftsman at the London Underground Signals Office. London Underground was initially sceptical of Beck’s radical proposal, an uncommissioned spare-time project, but tentatively introduced it to the public in a small pamphlet in 1933. It was immediately popular, and the Underground has used topological maps to illustrate the network ever since.
Prior to the Beck diagram, the various underground lines had been laid out geographically, often superimposed over the roadway of a city map. This meant the centrally located stations were shown very close together and the out-of-town stations spaced far apart. From around 1909 a new type of ‘map’ appeared inside the train cars; it was a non-geographic linear diagram, in most cases a simple straight horizontal line, which equalized the distances between stations. By the late 1920s most Underground lines and some mainline (especially LNER) services displayed these, many of which had been drawn by George Dow. Some writers and broadcasters have speculated that Dow’s maps in-part inspired Beck’s work. The geographical-based map, used immediately prior to Beck, in 1932, was produced by the underground map designer for the period 1926-1932, F. H. Stingemore. It was Stingemore’s idea to slightly expand the central area of the map for ease of reading.
It was however Beck who had the idea of creating a full system map in colour. He believed that Underground passengers were not concerned with geographical accuracy and were more interested in how to get from one station to another and where to change trains. While drawing an electrical circuit diagram, Beck came up with a new idea for a map that was based upon the concept of an electrical schematic rather than a geographic map on which all the stations were more-or-less equally spaced. Beck first submitted his idea to Frank Pick of London Underground in 1931 but it was considered too radical because it didn’t show distances relative from any one station to the others. The design was therefore rejected by the Publicity Department at first, but the designer persisted. So, after a successful trial of 500 copies in 1932, distributed via a select few stations, the map was given its first full publication in 1933 (700,000 copies). The positive reaction from customers proved it was a sound design, and a large reprint was required after only one month.
Beck continued to update the Tube map regularly on a freelance basis, but the later Victoria Line was added in 1960 by Publicity Officer Harold Hutchison, much to Beck’s shock and dismay. Subsequently, many other changes were also introduced to the map without Beck’s approval, and his name no longer featured at the bottom of the map.
Beck struggled furiously to regain control of the map through a prolonged legal dispute that eventually became harmful to his wife’s mental health. In 1965 he eventually gave up the legal battle “bitter and betrayed by the very organization he had helped, so admirably, to promote.” Responsibility for the map was eventually given to a third designer, Paul Garbutt. Garbutt changed the style of the map to look more like Beck’s maps of the 1930s, and also introduced the “vacuam flask” shape for the Circle Line. Although Beck preferred this version to Hutchison’s, he wasn’t completely satisfied. He started to make a new map, based on both his earlier works and Garbutt’s ideas. When this version was also rejected despite its simplicity and ease-of-reading, Beck realised that London Transport would never publish another map in his hand. Nevertheless, he continued to make sketches and drawings for the map until his death in the 1970s.
In 1997, Beck’s importance was posthumously recognised, and currently (2013) the statement ‘This diagram is an evolution of the original design conceived in 1931 by Harry Beck’ is printed on every London Underground map.
In 1938 Beck also produced a diagram of the entire rail system of the London region, this included both the Underground and mainlines. It was not published at the time but was seen in Ken Garland’s book, first published in 1994; it took until 1973 until any official attempt was made to replicate a rail diagram for the entire London region. Beck produced at least two versions of a diagram for the Paris Metro. The project, which Beck was never commissioned to do, may have been begun, according to Ken Garland, as early as before the start of World War II. A version dating from approximately 1946 is published in Garland’s book. His second version is published for the first time in Mark Ovenden’s book about the Paris Métro and is on display at the London Transport Museum.
According to some accounts, Beck was never formally commissioned to develop his initial idea and worked on the map only in his spare time. He was thus never actually paid for the map. Other sources report that he was paid a fee of five or ten guineas. In 1947, when he was not fully employed (having left London Transport) he began teaching typography and colour design at the London School of Printing and Kindred Trades.
After long failing to acknowledge Beck’s importance as the original designer of the Tube map, London Regional Transport finally created the Beck gallery at the London Transport Museum in the early 1990s, where his works are displayed. A commemorative plaque was installed up at Finchley Central Tube station. Beck’s home at 60 Courthouse Road, Finchley was marked with a plaque by the Finchley Society in 2003. Since 2001 Transport for London has also started to credit Beck for the original idea on the modern Tube maps.
In March 2006 viewers of BBC2’s The Culture Show and visitors to London’s Design Museum voted Harry Beck’s Tube map as their second-favourite British design of the 20th century in the Great British Design Quest. The winner was Concorde.
Beck’s idea has been emulated by subway, bus and transit companies around the world and many urban rail and metro maps use his principles.
