Winter 2025
The chap behind the diagram
The Truth About Harry Beck
By Andy Burden Cubic Theatre, London Transport Museum
Londoners and designers have an immense fondness for the London Underground diagram, or ‘tube map’. And they were out in force for The Truth About Harry Beck by Andy Burden, which ran at the Cubic Theatre in the basement of the London Transport Museum in Covent Garden. Directed by its author, the short play brings to life the story of the diagram’s creator with two actors and a simple set designed by Sue Condie Gardner.
Simon Snashall plays Harry (aka Henry) C. Beck with a mix of affability and single-minded obsession familiar to most of us involved in graphic design and typography. Beck’s wife Nora is played by Ashley Christmas, who also plays Frank Pick and every other character Beck encounters. Pick, the legendary Chief Executive of London Transport, initially turned down Beck’s tube map proposal as ‘too revolutionary’. Author and director Burden, who drew on the late Ken Garland’s research into Beck’s career, structures his single-act play around three ‘rejections’, dramatising the extent to which the adoption of Beck’s ideas depended on the designer’s unstoppable energy and conviction.
Beck, who had designed posters for the Underground, laments to Nora that, ‘Everything is neat except the map!’ Inspired by circuit diagrams with coloured wires, Beck’s great achievement was to show how an urban transport system – with multiple train lines and interchanges – actually functioned while downplaying geographical accuracy. His concepts were later copied worldwide, but few have what Nora calls the ‘graphic grace’ of the original.
On stage, Beck’s epiphany is dramatised with a mass of coloured ribbons that fill the space. Snashall and Christmas encourage audience participation: the players frequently break the ‘fourth wall’. Beck’s idea is vindicated when a small run of printed maps is snapped up by commuters in January 1933. The public love the new Underground diagram, and Beck continues to repurpose his design, adapting it to each new change in
the network, sometimes still at odds with management.
‘London Underground is a living breathing thing,’ says Beck, who remained freelance for most of his life. Despite his modest demeanour, he takes pride in knowing his diagram is ‘the pinnacle of all I have done.’ JLW
John L. Walters, Eye editor, London
First published in Eye no. 107 vol. 27, 2025
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