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Tube map

The Tube map (sometimes called the London Underground map) is a schematic transport map of the lines, stations and services of the London Underground, known colloquially as "the Tube", hence the map's name. The first schematic Tube map was designed by Harry Beck in 1931. Since then, it has been expanded to include more of London's public transport systems, including the Docklands Light Railway, London Overground, the Elizabeth line, Tramlink, the London Cable Car and Thameslink.

As a schematic diagram, it shows not the geographic locations but the relative positions of the stations, lines, the stations' connective relations and fare zones. The basic design concepts have been widely adopted for other such maps around the world and for maps of other sorts of transport networks and even conceptual schematics.

A regularly updated version of the map is available from the official Transport for London website. In 2006, the Tube map was voted one of Britain's top 10 design icons which included Concorde, Mini, Supermarine Spitfire, K2 telephone box, World Wide Web and the AEC Routemaster bus. Since 2004, Art on the Underground has been commissioning artists to create covers for the pocket Tube map.

As London's early transport system was operated by a variety of independent companies, there were no complete maps of the network, just for the individual companies' routes. The maps were not typically schematic and were simply the line overlaid on a regular city map. There was no integration of the companies' services or any co-operation in advertising.

In 1907, The Evening News commissioned a pocket map, The Evening News London "Tube Map". It was the first map to show all of the lines with equal weight being given to each line, and it was the first map to use a different colour for each line.

Another early combined map was published in 1908 by the Underground Electric Railways Company of London (UERL) in conjunction with four other underground railway companies that used the "Underground" brand as part of a common advertising factor.

The map showed eight routes – four operated by the UERL and one from each of the other four companies:

A geographical map presented restrictions since for sufficient clarity of detail in the crowded central area of the map required the extremities of the District and Metropolitan lines to be omitted and so a full network diagram was not provided. The problem of truncation remained for nearly half a century. Although all of the western branches of the District and Piccadilly lines were included for the first time in 1933 with Harry Beck's first proper Tube map, the portion of the Metropolitan line beyond Rickmansworth did not appear until 1938, and the eastern end of the District line did not appear until the mid-1950s.

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