Sheng's waking life: Design at the Centre of the new London Transport Museum

Design at the Centre of the new London Transport Museum

Part of a drawing by Edward Johnston of the iconic London Underground roundel and bar, known as the
“bullseye design”, that forms part of the design gallery at the newly opened London Transport Museum

The London Transport Museum has recently opened its doors to visitors once again and CR was lucky enough to have a good look around. Of particular interest is the new design gallery which, if its placing in the middle of the museum is anything to go by, now takes centre stage among the tube trains and buses that fill up the floor space. Design, it seems, has always been at the very heart of London Transport and this is now something the new-look museum aims to celebrate wholeheartedly.

The Design for Travel gallery is part of a major transformation project at the LTM which has cost £22.4 million and taken two years to complete. Also new is the World Cities gallery – the walkway into the museum itself – that was designed by the Conran Design Group. This display highlights the many different transport systems from around the world and features footage made by passengers that was collected via a call for content made by the museum on Facebook.

The World Cities gallery design by the Conran Design Group

It’s not quite what you expect as you enter the museum, but then much of LTM’s redevelopment has gone into making it feel more interactive and contemporary, with touch screen information points located at each display. Indeed, the most progressive part of the new-look museum is the enormous Complex Connections screen, designed by Ralph Applebaum Associates and Paragon Creative, which displays live data feeds of the city’s traffic flow and maps of people’s journeys across the network.

The huge Complex Connections screen (designed by Ralph Applebaum Associates
and Paragon Creative) displays real-time traffic information and shows how individual
customers use the network in a given day

The new design gallery has been created to showcase what the museum refers to as its “crown jewels” and this lovingly curated section explores how transport has proved vital in shaping London’s cultural identity. The development of the London Transport poster runs along many of the previous displays (the ones on show are only a fraction of the 5000 held in the London Transport archives in Acton) with one particularly well-covered area being the growth of leisure opportunities provided by the transport system as it expanded. “Metroland” refers to the areas of suburban growth that followed the expansion of the Metropolitan line, with places like Neasden, Harrow, Watford and Wembley springing up along the way. Many posters were made to reflect the new opportunities that the expanding boundaries of the city could provide.

The Design for Travel gallery at the LTM

Famous names like Edward Johnston and Harry Beck are, of course, more extensively celebrated in the design gallery itself and their work appears among London Transport’s considerable achievements in architecture. There are some great models of the beautiful modernist stations of Charles Holdern – like Rayners Lane and Arnos Grove – for example.

Harry Beck’s original 1933 underground map

Detail of Beck’s 1933 map

While Harry Beck’s original re-drawn map of the London Underground is on show (Beck was an engineering draughtsman so there’s some suggestion that he based his design on a wiring diagram) one of the museum’s most recent acquisitions also bears the great man’s name. What’s interesting, however, is that it’s his design for the Paris Metro system, which employed the same approach as his London map. Not wanting to appear copyist, Beck’s Paris design was promptly rejected by the French authorities and was never used.

Beck’s rejected Paris Metro map can be seen bottom right in this image, under the London map

What’s apparent when you browse the many treasures on display here is the vital links between London Transport and the graphic artists of the time. Man Ray and Abram Games both designed classic posters for the network and, with the opening of the Victoria line in the 1960s, artists (like Games) were also invited to design murals and mosaics for individual stations.

In this way, the work of countless celebrated designers still has a place within the contemporary network. But to see some of the great work from London Transport’s past, a trip to the museum’s design gallery is most definitely worth the tube fare.

Misha Black and John Barker’s At London’s Service poster from 1947