London Underground By Design by Mark Ovenden – review

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/feb/03/london-underground-design-ovenden-review

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This year marks the 150th anniversary of the first London underground line, the Metropolitan. The Met is being celebrated mainly for its engineering, and it is commonly thought that, having heroically dug their giant trench from Paddington to Farringdon, the pioneers weren't too bothered about conceptualising the look of the thing. Illustrations do suggest that the early surface buildings were perfunctory and disparate. But in this authoritative chronicle of underground design, Mark Ovenden detects "early examples of corporate branding": for example in the consistent use of large gas globes to contain gas lights.

Some of the first pictures in this book – which bristles with photographs I've never seen before – show how London's commercial free-for-all obstructed the early fumbling after coherence and clarity. A shot from the 1870s of the facade of Victoria underground station shows what Ovenden calls a "shouty" hoarding for "TP Beattie, Specialist in Plumbing and Sanitary Engineering" as almost upstaging the station name.

Real aesthetic progress began with the advent of the deep-level lines, the tubes properly so-called, in the 1890s. To counteract claustrophobia, both the City & South London (which would later become the Bank branch of the Northern line) and the Central had bright, white-tiled stations. The idea – probably inspired by the decor of public lavatories – was copied on the Paris Métro. Other tubes were built during the Edwardian period by Charles Tyson Yerkes. He was an American fraudster and philanderer, but also a great benefactor to London, not least through his employment of architect Leslie Green, most of whose stations survive in central London. The exteriors are covered in tiles usually denoted as "oxblood" (purple-red); the ticket halls are predominantly a deep, relaxing green, with art nouveau swirls. Below ground, each station had – and has – its own colour scheme, for the benefit of illiterate passengers.

In 1906, Frank Pick, who was both a Yorkshire solicitor and aesthetic to the point of neurosis, joined the company Yerkes had created. Pick became the de facto head of design on the underground throughout the interwar period, and he was applying his public-spirited doctrine of "fitness for purpose" long before the underground became a public corporation in 1933. It was Pick who oversaw the evolution of the underground roundel from a red blob with bar to a more elegant hollow circle with bar. For the lettering – principally station names – that would appear on the bar, he commissioned the typographer's typographer of the day, Edward Johnston, to supply a sans serif typeface that could be easily read from a moving train.

Pick recruited Charles Holden to design the austere, geometric suburban stations of tube extensions of the 20s and 30s. But Holden also gave us the remodelled Piccadilly Circus station of 1928, which Ovenden describes as "a masterpiece of opulence and chic". (It was as though Holden, ostensibly an ascetic teetotaller, had hit the champagne when designing this icon of West End glamour.) In 1933, Pick commissioned the diagrammatic tube map from Harry Beck, without which the network would look, as Beck himself said, like a plate of vermicelli. And Pick was behind the 1938 tube stock: red trains with cosy interiors and every detail consummately thought through. As Ovenden says, "even the alarm pull was incorporated into the ceiling profile". (The 38s had the amiability of Routemaster buses, and remained in service for 50 years.)

Ovenden is generous about the cramped and dour Victoria line of 1968. Of its insipid grey and weak blue colour scheme, he notes: "passengers would supply the colour". The Jubilee line extension of 1999 was built in glorious reaction to the Victoria, in that its stations are "future-proofed", ie big, and flamboyant. A certain deep-blue "cone wall" at Southwark station was, we learn here, "inspired by an 1816 stage set for The Magic Flute".

This book does ample justice to a network that – overcrowded and overpriced though it may currently be – is "a glorious palimpsest of design".

Andrew Martin is the author of Underground, Overground: A Passenger's History of the Tube (Profile £8.99)

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