Many years ago, a tourist in London, let’s call him Peter, needed to travel from Covent Garden to Leicester Square. He opened the London Underground Map he carried in his pocket and saw that Leicester Square was one stop away.

The map he was looking at was created in the early 1930s by an electrical engineer called Harry Beck. Harry Beck had taken an extremely complicated map and made it simple. One element of simplicity was that the stations were shown equidistance on the map.

Peter went down the escalator to the Covent Garden station, rode the subway for what seemed to be a very short time and then took the lift up at Leicester Square.

In reality, these two stations are among the closest in the entire London Underground system, separated by a mere 260 meters (about 850 feet). It would have taken Peter a shorter time to walk between the two stations than to take the Tube, considering the time spent going down to the platform and waiting for a train.

This incident humorously highlights the practical limitations of schematic maps but we still use them because the pluses far outweigh these drawbacks.

Here is the story about how the new London Underground Map was born and became the template for all subway maps in the world.

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