Mind the Map

For the millions who use the Tube every day there is only one way to make sense of it: Harry Beck's diagrammatic map, first designed in 1931. Revered as British "design classic", Beck's map has provided inspired for mapping transport systems in cities the world over, and continues to inform how we use and understand these complex entities. Beck's map is therefore a worthy focus for Mind the Map: Inspiring Art, Design and Cartography, the current exhibition at London's Transport Museum.

Split over two floors in a corner of the Museum, the compact exhibition is divided into four thematically organised areas that intersperse a history of London's transport maps with a series of cartographic artworks inspired by or specially commissioned for the exhibition. Mind the Map opens with one of the latter: Susan Stockwell's Memento, a multi-coloured world map made up of overlapping ticket stubs donated from all over the world. Speaking of the close relationship between people, memory and place, Memento is also a eulogy to the paper ticket — a form of souvenir rapidly disappearing in our increasingly digital realm.

The changing technology of mapping is a persistent theme here. For the past twelve years Jeremy Wood has been using GPS to track his movements on London's public transport system, in order to create works such as London Overground (2012), which uses the Tube's own colour scheme to map his journeys. While Wood's hand-drawn works offer a poetic take on data visualisation, they also reminder us that today every step we take is documented — whether we are aware of it or not.

Highlights in the exhibition's opening historical section include those by the little-known MacDonald Gill. His decorative, cheerful works such as the Wonderground Map of London Town (1914) testify to the skill involved in mapmaking, while others here speak of how maps have been used not just to advertise, to entertain and inform, but also to express power. This is most explicit in Ernest Michael Dinkel's 1933 Visit the Empire by London's Underground, which enticed visitors to the exotic colonial imports on show at London attractions such as the Zoo and Kew Gardens. At the centre is a map of the world — all white except for those parts in red, markers of Britain's former imperial reach.

Several artworks expose this highly subjective nature of maps, whose authoritative, objective air is all too often taken for granted. This is the case with Stephen Walter's London Subterranea (2012), an arresting, hand-drawn map that charts what he describes as the "clandestine world" of the city's underground tunnels and local histories. Walters' highly personal map also illustrates how a visually successful map is not necessary a geographically truthful one. This was what first inspired Beck's design, whose evolution occupies the first part of the exhibition's upper floor. Although London transport maps had been available since 1908, they were impossibly complex affairs. It was only when working as a draughtsman on an electrical circuit diagram for the London Transport Passenger Board that Beck saw a way to improve them, by straightening the lines between stations and making more uniform the distances between them. An instant success with the public, Beck had a more troubled relationship with his superiors, never receiving full recognition for his design — an aspect glossed over here.

The final section focuses on Beck's map as a source of creative inspiration. It includes works such as Simon Patterson's Great Bear (1992) and Saptarishi (2012), pastiches in which station names have been replaced with the names of stars of a celebrity and celestial nature respectively. Others reaffirm the themes of memory and technology, such as Agnè's Poltevin-Navarre's Proustian The Land of Hopeful Commuters (2012), in which she mapped commuters' hopes by postcode and Ben James' Emotional Map of London (2012), an interactive touch screen that invites visitors to log the emotions they most associate with the city's Tube stations.

Most notable here is how the map's recognisability has seen it used as a branding tool by Transport for London, the city's transport authority. This still makes it an outlet for artistic activity; amongst the exhibits are designs for pocket map covers commissioned from artists such as Barbara Kruger and Cornelia Parker. However, while the exhibition attempts to assert the map's status as a design "classic", its use to sell products such as flip-flops, tee shirts, and even the city itself, ultimately undermines this iconicity.

Mind the Map is a highly informative exhibition, shedding light on the history of London's underground system and the city itself. Even if it does not probe too deeply some of the issues raised here, the exhibits illustrate the rich and varied language of maps, and suggest that we could all benefit from looking again at the maps we so unconsciously rely on in our everyday. Catharine Rossi (@cat_rossi)

Through 28 October 2012
Mind the Map: Inspiring Art, Design and Cartography
London Transport Museum
Covent Garden Piazza, London