I have always liked the London Tube Map: it's a design classic. If only my taxonomies could look so neat and be parcelled up in such a compact way: it amazes me that all the tube stations in Greater London can fit inside my wallet on a tiny card which is still easy to decipher. It was one of the first things about London that looked familiar to me: my Dad, an electrician, told me before I came down the first time that the tube map is "just a big wiring diagramme," and that is exactly what it is: designed by electrical engineer Harry Beck in 1933, based on the circuit diagrammes with which he worked.

The tube map revolutionised London and the way that Londoners thought about their city. Today it is almost impossible not to picture the place divided up by tube lines and stations, and, when we do so, we are holding in our minds an image of the tube map, and picture the nearness of our destination by proximity to the map's features. At the bottom of this page, the Transport for London website includes a Macromedia Flash presentation that allows you to click and see the current tubemap for Central London morph into the original 1933 version and / or into a streetmap version.

One of my very favourite blogs, The Map Room has pointed a link to the 'London Underground Map Translated into German' by Horst Prillinger. It's really great, and funny in places. I like "Kennington's" having been translated as "Ken's Hof" (which can be translated back as "Ken's Yard), and I like the clever touches elswhere in that part of the Northern Line : "Elephant and Castle" is rendered as "Elefant und Burg" which shows far better than the original English the relationship between it and its neighbour, "Burg" - "Borough." The best pun is obviously the rendering of the Bakerloo Line as "Bäker-WC."