Should Thameslink Be On The London Tube Map?
in 2018, Crossrail and an updated Thameslink will be fully opened to form an East-West/North-South railway crossing London.
Transport for London has stated that Crossrail will be added to the tube map, but should Thameslink be added as well?
In the 1980s, Thameslink was for a period on the tube map, as is indicated in this forum.
But the tube map is very crowded around St. Pancras and Farringdon, which probably led to the line’s removal.
London Tube Map
To make matters worse the upgraded Thameslink will call at more Underground and Overground stations, like Finsbury Park, Peckham Rye and Denmark Hill.
So to put Thameslink on the 2018 tube map might not be very easy.
Why Is London’s Transport So Well Mapped?
I’ve travelled all over the UK and a lot of Europe in recent years, and as I don’t drive, I have to use public transport.
What amazes me, is how poor mapping is in most cities and towns outside London.
There are exceptions like Munich, Glasgow and surprisingly, Ipswich, but most are pretty terrible. I’ve even had a letter in The Times complaining how bad the situation is in the UK.
So why is London so much more advanced with its maps, information and wayfinding?
In the 1920s and 1930s when the Underground was going through a major expansion, they probably had a problem with passengers not knowing where they could go!
So this led to Harry Beck‘s iconic Tube map, a version of which is still use today.
In the 1950s, when I started to explore London on my own, my mother told me that if I got lost to find a Tube station, as they had a tube map to me back to Oakwood and a local street map to find what I was looking for. It is still the same today, except that the tube map is more comprehensive and the local maps are generally larger and much better.
Over the last few years London has applied the pre-war principles to the buses, with bus route or spider maps that could have been designed by Harry himself and local walking maps at every bus stop with a shelter.
And then there’s Legible London and all its liths and fingerposts. Wikipedia sums it up like this.
Unlike other wayfinding projects, Legible London leaps over bureaucratic boundaries in order to provide one consistent visual language and wayfinding system across the city. This city–wide approach was implemented to help visitors and local residents to easily gain local geographic knowledge regardless of the area they are in.
In contrast if you go to the Manchester area, Manchester uses one design and Salford another.
London is different to other UK cities and most in Europe, in that it is so much larger.
Consequently, most Londoners are regularly a visitor in their own city, when they find themselves in a part of the city they don’t know.
And of course this applies to those who manage the city, so they appreciate the problem.
If you take a city like Nottingham or Liverpool, most of the locals probably have the city in their head, so they can’t see the point of providing consistent visitor information all over the area. And if it were to be installed, many locals would see it as a waste of money.
So I believe that London’s size is the main reason its information system is so good.
But you must add the tradition started by Harry Beck! He may not be lauded as a great artist, but surely the London Tube Map is one of the greatest examples of public art of all time.
The Anonymous Widower 