In February 2024, a series of circular tube maps appeared at a clutch of Circle line stations as part of a promo for some new Samsung phone tech.
It was an astute little stunt, but certainly not the first time a tube map had gone discoidal. Jonny Fisher circled the tube map back in 2012, and the following year, cartographer Max Roberts — determined to improve on Fisher's design, as well as being inspired by the prospect of the then-pretty-new orbital Overground line — rearranged the lines into a satisfying concentricity, with the masterstroke of fashioning the Circle line into the outline of the London Underground roundel.
One well-known commentator, Roberts reveals in an in-depth lengthy interview, had asserted this move was 'gimmicky', except, says Roberts: "it was absolutely not deliberate. Once I had decided that the Circle line should not be a perfect circle, and that the sides would have to be horizontal lines, then roundel is the shape you get, nothing else is viable."
Anyway, here was a pedigree of alternative tube map that made you do a chef's kiss before you'd even thought about what you were doing. And though Roberts — who is a psychologist as well as a designer — insists the circular tube map was just a bit of fun, it went on to attract sweeping media coverage, not to mention calls to have TfL adopt it as an official variation. "I actually intended this map to be a sort of cartographic joke," says Roberts, "I was surprised that it was being taken seriously conceptually. If I had intended that, then I would have approached it differently!"
This is part of the reason why, 11 years later, Roberts is revisiting the map. The real reason though circles back (sorry, had to) to that Samsung advertising campaign. Says Roberts, "A number of my friends suggested to me that this design was potentially infringing the copyright of my own circles map. In my understanding of the law, it is not possible to copyright a genre or a concept, only its specific execution."
Instead, Roberts was driven to improve on his original design even further, making it a serious — and seriously useful — map for those navigating the system, rather than the "toy map" TfL and Samsung had come up with.
As well as adding in a few new Overground stations (he'd already had the foresight to add in the Elizabeth line and Northern line extension) Roberts switched out Tottenham Court Road for Oxford Circus as the bullseye. He also allowed himself less leeway when it came to tweaking stations topographically. "Straightening lines without thinking about the consequences of creating bizarrely space-warped locales is just lazy," he says, "With care and thought it should be possible to create a map that has simple line trajectories, is attractive to look at, and is spatially informative where it matters most, so that people can choose journeys confident that a distorted map is not misleading them." To this end, Roberts' 2024 map ensures that interchanges which are walkable in reality also appear on the map (take, for example, Liverpool Street and Shoreditch High Street).
Is it the perfect tube map? There is no such thing, says Roberts: "I have mapped London in so many different ways over the years and my designs can't all be correct." However, the designer is confident that anyone using it for practical reasons will quickly warm to the unorthodox design: "I think they would be far better off with it than the current official map," says Roberts, "although that's more to highlight the failings of the official version than to sing my own praises." Better watch your back, TfL.
Read Max Robert's fantastic article about his creation, and recreation of the circular tube map. You can also buy the new circular tube map from the Tube Map Central shop.
