The question might just as easily have been: what is indispensable to the 8.3m people who live in London and its 15.3m annual visitors? Last year alone the Tube carried 1.1bn passengers, with the network’s 4,134 carriages traversing an incredible 45m miles in total.
And this is just a tiny snapshot of the sterling work the system has been putting in getting people from A to B throughout its 150 year history. Often heralded as one of the best designed transport systems in the world, it’s hard to imagine how Londoners could ever have coped without the iconic roundel sign guiding them through the capital’s hubbub. And, as reflected by many of the 15th anniversary celebratory events and activities this year, it’s hard to imagine how this network could ever have fared without print.
Print primacy
One printed form receiving particular attention this year is the poster, with an exhibition at the London Transport Museum showing 150 of what a panel of experts have deemed the most interesting examples of the museum’s 3,300-strong collection.
It is hard to over-state just how different the Underground system might be today had it not been for a radical approach to poster commissioning early on, reports Anna Renton, senior curator at the London Transport Museum.
The first example of what we would now immediately recognise as a ‘poster’ – that is, a piece of print dominated by an image and supplemented by a strapline – dates back to 1908. The world’s first underground railway had been established using steam locomotives between Paddington and Farringdon in 1863 by the Metropolitan Railway Company. By 1908, the first deep-level Tube lines had been cut and electric locomotives had now been introduced by three forerunners of today’s lines, collectively known as the Underground Electric Railways Company of London (UERL).
The result was that the railway companies were facing two very pressing, and interconnected, problems: huge amounts of investment to recoup, and large swathes of the public understandably cautious about using these new facilities.
“You can see in the first poster a concern with showing this as a clean, bright, spacious and easy to navigate environment,” says Renton of the 1908 poster (right), produced by renowned illustrator John Hassall and displaying the strapline ‘No need to ask a P’liceman’. “It’s significant the public in it have been depicted as kind of country bumpkins.”
“The UERL needed to find more ways of getting more passengers on,” agrees Oliver Green, research fellow at London Transport Museum and author of Frank Pick’s London. “Some were understandably a bit frightened about going from steam trains not very far under the ground, which they were used to, to new technology with lifts that could drop you way underground and electric trains that would whizz you around. It was like science fiction becoming a reality.”
Producing a whole host of posters portraying the safe, modern nature of the Tube and its pleasant environment was a smart move, then. But particularly savvy was the UERL’s approach to print. These works used colour chromolithographic printing way before this process, involving oil-based ‘wax crayons’, gum arabic and separate stones for each colour, was widely used.
“Colour lithographic print had been developed by the 1890s, but it was used for a limited number of things; to advertise theatre productions and such like. So the UERL’s use of it was quite boundary-breaking,” says Green.
“Before this you have posters, but they are produced using letterpress,” he says. “So they’re just a mass of different typefaces. They tell you how to get to various places, but as posters, which need to be pretty direct, they’re almost indigestible.”
The man very much behind this highly innovative approach to design and print was Frank Pick. He joined UERL in 1906 and, as a former administrator at North Eastern Railway and a native of Lincolnshire, could see how confusing the new system was. Embracing lithography and all of the new design possibilities it opened up went part and parcel with Pick’s complete overhaul of platform design, reports Green.
“It was only through Pick, as assistant managing director and then managing director of UERL, that they really got to grips with cleaning up the stations. Before this the stations looked completely chaotic, there were posters and things all over the walls. The problem that Frank Pick recognised when he arrived was that if you were a passenger on a train coming into one of the stations you were just faced with this wall of print and couldn’t even see the station name,” says Green.
“When Frank Pick came along and started getting into poster commissioning, he really tidied up the advertising space available, so instead of floor to ceiling print, he put in place pretty much what we have today,” explains Renton.
It wasn’t only posters and signage that were used to radically enhance the ease with which passengers could navigate this previously bamboozling network. Also really very forward-thinking for the time, was UERL’s use of other printed ephemera, most notably Harry Beck’s pocket map, which came into being in 1933 and is still the envy of other major networks according to Green.
Pretty soon all these kinds of print were vital not just to improving the ease and comfort of travel – print was soon deployed to forge an association between the London Underground and the exciting leisure activities it opened up for passengers.
Again, the formats and printing techniques used were ahead of their time. “UERL became quite famous for setting the style of publicity in general. They moved into other things like booklets, and by the 1920s they were issuing things such as country walks books,” says Green. “They produced lots of guidebooks for various things in London – not free but very cheap. They became effectively the London Tourist Bureau because there was no such thing at the time.”
“They got the best illustrators so that by the 1930s they were using people like Eric Ravilious and Edward Bawden,” continues Green. “And you have to remember that this was early days for paperbacks. Things like Penguin paperbacks only came out in the late 1930s when London Transport was already doing that.”
In making the Underground synonymous with culture, again the way posters were executed was key. Inline with use of highly renowned illustrators for pamphlets and booklets, posters evolved into attractive works of cutting-edge design, even fine art, in their own right.
Only the best
Again marking very much something of a world first, Pick began commissioning some of the finest artists and graphic designers of the day, including Edward McKnight Kauffer and Charles Pain.
“Frank Pick famously said he thought art should get down from
her pedestal and work for a living,” reports Renton. “The idea is that you could have really good design, you could have really good art, you didn’t necessarily need to separate them out. He was very adventurous in commissioning very challenging artworks for people. For example Kauffer’s style is adopting lessons learnt from Vorticism literally a few years after it’s a really cutting-edge art movement, straight to the average man on the street.”
The role of the printers tasked with producing these usually 1,000-run posters, should not be underestimated, says Renton: “Breaking down the images into their separate colours and redrawing them onto their litho stones or plates, these printers were very much artists in their own right,” she says.
Indeed, one printer, Charles Sharland, a studio artist at prolific Underground printers Waterlow & Sons, was often commissioned not only to print the posters but design and draw them too.
Another business playing a pivotal role was east London-based Curwen Press. While a lot of lithographic artists were unionised to protect their profession, the Curwen Press was one of the few facilitating autolithography. This was a process coming very much into vogue at the time, where the artist drew directly onto the printing plate or stone to create vivid textures and patterns, as found in much of Barnett Freedman’s work.
The result of investing so much time and energy in keeping posters fresh was that the Underground became affiliated with art in a way that no other transport system around the world has been able to match.
“The 20s and 30s were the golden age for the poster,” says Renton. “By the time we get to the 30s, the Underground was advertising in blank poster boxes that they were waiting for the next Kauffer, for example, and these posters were so appreciated, people would be waiting excitedly for them. Art students would run out to buy the latest Kauffer poster because they just loved his work.”
And this unusual association of a functional system with mood-enhancing and thought-provoking art of course continues to this day.
The poster suffered something of a fall from grace during and after the Second World War due to paper shortages, a rise in other advertising mediums and the retirement of its champion Frank Pick in 1940. And the advent of photography in the 50s and 60s meant that poster design became fairly generic and “lowest common denominator,” reports Green.
By the 1970s and 80s, conditions on the Tube had deteriorated and it was once more not a particularly pleasant place to be. Which is why a resurrection of Art on the Underground in the 80s was an inspired solution to advertising hoardings which the network was anyway struggling to sell. The ‘Poetry on the Underground’ initiative started in 1986, and special edition map cover designs have come to hold a similarly dear place in Londoners’ hearts.
“Nowhere else has the same kind of affection for the logo and font design, and for the artworks found on its underground network,” believes Green. “New York’s subway has always been a sort of grim hole in the ground. It’s better than it was but it was always a very utilitarian system that did nothing to ingratiate itself with the user.”
“London Underground has some of the richest brand identity. It’s so intrinsic to London; the roundel is instantly recognisable,” agrees Julie Dixon, head of marketing services at Transport for London (TfL) today. “That history of great design runs right through the organisation.”
Ongoing impact
Today, print still plays an important role on London’s Underground network, not only to make it a more attractive environment, but for a whole range of practical tasks too, reports Dixon. The network prints around 22m pieces each year, including between 4,000 to 8,000 Tube maps, and a wide range of carriage signage, public information posters, maps advising alternative walking routes for busy times such as during the London Olympics, step-free maps and black and white Tube maps for the visually impaired.
And, perhaps surprisingly, Dixon is adamant print will continue to play a key role for a long time to come. TfL is constantly reviewing which formats travellers most value information in, she reports, but much of this research points back to print.
“Our recent research found that people use a mixture according to what’s most convenient at the time. Obviously there’s Wi-Fi in a lot of stations now, but some people don’t want to get their phones out all of the time,” says Dixon.
“Introducing digital will depend on the sorts of technology we can get into the stations for the right price. At the moment a Tube map works so well on a wall. A screen has to still work in daylight, it’s got to be of the right quality, have the right clarity. We’re always looking at how technology’s changing but at the moment print is typically the medium that’s working well for us. It’s the speed of the print at the moment. To develop digital advertising takes longer and can be more expensive.”
Green also doubts whether digital advertising and signage will ever completely take over: “I think people have a huge affection for print on the Underground past and present. Christies have a sale coming up of posters including London Underground posters from the 20s and 30s, and they’ll all go for more than £1,000 each.”
Not fetching quite these amounts but nonetheless apparently selling well are the poster prints of the ‘15 for 150’ artworks, commissioning 15 contemporary artists, including Sarah Lucas and Gillian Wearing, to create pieces reflecting their experiences of the Tube. A limited-edition print apparently doesn’t have to have historical significance yet to be a coveted item.
Green adds: “Just from a purely practical point of view, I can’t see things moving entirely to digital because that has its limitations. It might work for somewhere like Piccadilly Circus, and has done there for years, but it’s never going to become the entire environment because you might get back to the riot of things, like the Victorians had before.”
It seems, then, that print’s unique relationship to the London Underground in the form of iconic maps, signage and posters is, for the foreseeable future at least, very much here to stay. Nowhere else, it seems, holds quite such affection for the symbols and signifiers of its transport heritage. And central to this fond attachment, is a love of print.
