Great engineers celebrated on new official/alternative tube map.
Just when you think that the tube map must have been distorted in every conceivable way, someone comes along to prove you wrong. This week, it's Transport for London themselves. In cahoots with the Royal Academy of Engineering, it's replaced the names of stations with those of top engineers. It's a neat way to celebrate National Engineering Day (1 November).
In the tradition of the original alternative tube map, Simon Patterson's The Great Bear, each line carries a sub-theme. For example, the Bakerloo celebrates engineers who contributed to sports, media and culture. Here you'll find the likes of TV pioneer John Logie Baird, but also presenter Steph McGovern who trained as an engineer before moving into broadcasting. The Jubilee line, meanwhile, concerns itself with military folk. Here, we find a long list of eminent Sirs including Barnes Wallace, Frank Whittle and Frederick Handley Page, but also many less familiar names like naval electronics engineer Elizabeth Killick. And so on.
The joy of schemes like this is to try and work out what's going on at the interchanges. Only a polymath like Nikola Tesla, for example, could be placed at King's Cross, where he straddles five differently themed lines. Penelope Endersby, meanwhile, is at London Bridge, presiding over "computing, technology and AI" (Northern line) and "military and defence" (Jubilee). A quick look at her Wikipedia page confirms that she led cyber and information systems at the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory. So, yes, she does indeed tick both boxes.
Unless you work in the field, 90% of the names will likely be unfamiliar. I guess that's the point. The map invites us to look a bit deeper at some of these 274 names and learn about what they contributed to society. I had no idea who Penelope Endersby and Elizabeth Killick are, but now I do. So, hoorah!
By contrast, the map's creators are given tiny billing down in one corner. So here's a shout out to Elspeth Cuerden (RAEng), Rebecca Lindsay (RAEng) and Ben Hellawell (TfL), who've engineered a superb alternative tube map.
The Engineering Icons tube map can be viewed in full on TfL's website.
