London’s rail network is complex, and becoming more so. One shouldn’t complain about this – honestly, have you tried living in Literally Any Other British City? – but one of the slight downsides is that it’s made the map of the capital’s rail network increasingly bloody ugly.

Luckily, there are people trying to fix this, purely out of the goodness of their heart and not in any way because it might get someone like us to shower them with free publicity. One such hero is Jug Cerović, the Belgrade-born and Paris-based architect and designer, who long-time readers might recall as the

a) author of this piece about the source of station names on the Paris’ metro;

b) bloke who got his unauthorised redesign adopted as the official bus map of Luxembourg; and

c) creator of this unofficial take on the tube map from 2015.

Click to expand.

 

He’s now taken another pass at tidying up the tangle of spaghetti that makes up London’s rail network. And, at risk of being nice about something for once, it’s bloody lovely – an improvement, even, on his last go.

Click to expand.

Some things I really like about this map. It’s gone back to harry Beck’s classic design principle of largely using 45 degree angles to keep the map neat and legible.

Click to expand.

Jug’s last effort experimented with curves: this effort largely dispenses with them, except in the portrayal of the River Thames, thus highlighting the fact that it’s a different sort of thing.

(Actually, that’s not quite true, there are a few other curves like the Heathrow loop and the eastern end of the Circle line – but these can be justified by reasons of expedience so I don’t mind them so there.)

It also uses stronger, brighter colours for the tube lines than the rail ones. That means that, even though both are shown, the eye is drawn to the higher frequency bits of the network. And it colours the National Rail lines by terminal station, rather than train operating company, so that it’s easier to see the shape of the network. 

Click to expand.

Best of all, it’s dispensed with the ugly, grey scale zonal network that has dominated London’s official rail map for years, replacing it with tiny numbers telling you the zone of each individual station.

In a few places, the map takes much greater care to show geographic reality than the official version: Regent’s Park station is basically above the Circle line; Bethnal Green Overground is south of Bethnal Green Underground; and so on. It even shows London’s larger parks, which is just lovely.

It’s not perfect – what is? The relatively long-distance western end of the Elizabeth Line/Crossrail sits oddly on a map that largely restricts itself to Greater London and its immediate surroundings, and so bends awkwardly in an attempt to keep it visible.

The way a single Elizabeth line station will serve both Farringdon and Barbican has been forgotten, and while conflating the various Kings Cross/St Pancras stations into a single lump makes for clear design I’m not sure it’d be that useable for those unfamiliar with reality.

Click to expand.

And I’m not entirely sure it’s got the Thameslink service pattern correct – although since Thameslink never seems to have managed its timetabled service pattern it’s incredibly difficult to be sure.

But these are mere details. This map is both beautiful and useable in exactly the way the official versions currently aren’t.

You see? It can be done. Come on TfL, get your act together.

If you’d like to read more about the map and the design process, you can do so on Jug Cerović’s website here.

Jonn Elledge is the editor of CityMetric. He is on Twitter as @jonnelledge and on Facebook as JonnElledgeWrites. 

All images courtesy of Jug Cerović.