Category: London

Categories
BODMAS Data Graphics London

London Borough Websites and their Election Data

lewishamdata

Lewisham’s “data”

I’ve been looking at a lot of London Borough council websites recently, for the Election Map. I’d rather I hadn’t – just one website would be better – but in London, each borough council publishes its local election results first and foremost to its own website, rather than it being pushed to a more central location such as London Councils which only holds aggregate data. It is also likely that the London Data Store, run by the Greater London Authority, will publish the combined results in due course.

So I’ve been visiting the 32 council websites in order to obtain the full (i.e. number of votes for every candidate in every ward) election data for 2014, for some forthcoming work. It’s striking how differently the data is presented, from site to site. A number of councils use the same software to show the data, but even there there are slight differences – and the other council websites do entirely their own thing.

Perhaps of most surprise is that – in 2014, only 1 of the 32 councils provide their election results in a machine readable data (e.g. CSV). Step forward the London Borough of Redbridge and their excellent data website – its interactive and database-driven nature meant that it struggled to show the live results on election night itself (judging by some now-deleted Tweets they sent out) but now that the “surge” of interest has passed, it means it is very easily to obtain the full dataset, even including geographical IDs that are critically important when creating a map – matching by name is fraught with errors due to punctuation and abbreviation variations.

hounslowdataAt the other end of the scale, Lewisham and Bromley councils only provide the data as PDFs. The tables contained with these does not indicate the winners – only the prose below it does. In Lewisham’s case the PDFs were scanned in so the text is not even copyable. Hounslow was a narrow second worst – while they did list all the candidates for all the wards on a single page (yay!) this information does not include the party that the candidates were representing (boo!). You have to go to another page for that and read the party name off a bar chart, as shown on the right here…

In the table below, I’ve awarded each council up to 5 stars on the following basis. This was inspired by Tim Berners-Lee’s Open Data deployment star system which uses a similar (but more nuanced) approach.

  • One star if the individual counts for most of the borough’s wards are available on the council’s main website or a dedicated subdomain, four days after the end of the election, in a searchable form (i.e. not as an image). Speedy and official publication is important for maximum transparency of the process. Only Lewisham failed have published their data by Monday evening. Croydon was pretty slow but got there in the end. Tower Hamlets results dribbled in but only one ward missed the deadline, which is not ideal but sufficient here.
  • Two stars if the data in available as structured data which is straightforward to manually extract for further processing. Examples where are good: HTML tables and Excel documents. Bromley’s results were supplied in the form of vector PDFs which made their tables difficult to copy. Hounslow’s results were presented in an attractive way, with maps and graphs, but no table containing both the candidate’s votes and their party.
  • Three stars if the data is free of errors and typos, such as punctuation problems (stray commas/hyphens, parts of candidate names in the party column, inconsistent ways of referencing which candidates were elected (or missing altogether) or party names, suggesting that it was input into the system in a structured/managed way.
  • Four stars if the data is supplied as a downloadable datafile in a standard machine-readable format, e.g. CSV, JSON, XML. Only Redbridge makes the data available in this way.
  • Five stars if the data contains ward and borough geographical identifier ONS GSS codes. Only Redbridge has this facility.
Rating Borough(s)
0 Lewisham
* Bromley, Hounslow
** Ealing, Hammersmith, Islington, Barking & Dagenham, Southwark, Kingston upon Thames^
*** Barnet, Bexley^, Brent^, Camden, Croydon, Enfield, Greenwich, Hackney, Hammersmith & Fulham, Haringey, Harrow^, Havering^, Hillingdon, Kensington & Chelsea, Lambeth^, Merton^, Newham^, Richmond upon Thames^, Sutton, Tower Hamlets^, Waltham Forest^, Wandsworth, Westminster
****
*****       Redbridge

^ = Councils that appear to use a common technology package for displaying their election results.

redbridgedata

Redbridge’s excellent data website.

A number of councils, mainly in the 3* category above and marked with a ^, seem to use the same software for displaying their election results on their webpages. The software outputs the results as tables, and includes graphs. If this one piece of software was improved to allow a data download (e.g. as a CSV with ONS GSS codes) of the tabular data, and was then pushed out to the relevant sites, then a lot of councils could move to give stars with a minimum of effort.

Categories
BODMAS London

London’s New Political Colour: 2014 Elections

Here is the new political colour of London for 2014, following the local council elections last week. Rather than applying a simple colour to each of the 32 boroughs as most election maps do, I have instead represented all the 628 wards, across the boroughs, as a coloured circle. The map shows votes, not results. Every one of the 6+ million votes cast has an effect on the colour of one of the circles, in some way. Interactive version.

votecolour

The final colour for each dot is an addition of colours for the votes for each of the political parties in that ward. Red = Labour, Blue = Conservative, Green = everything else (Lib Dems, UKIP, Greens etc). By adding the colours in the correct proportions, in the RGB (Red-Green-Blue) colour space, a single representative colour for each ward can be obtained.

N.B. Lewisham hadn’t published most of its ward results, more than four days after the election, when I took these screenshots, so they are shown with black dots here. There are also three more black dots – two elections have been postponed and one recount is to happen later today. The interactive version of the map has been updated now that the delayed results and recounts has happened.

Here is a version using colours for just the elected councillors (a maximum of three) in each ward, rather than considering all votes cast:

electedcolour

These maps are an update of a website that I built back in 2010 to visualise the election data then. The traditional way of representing an election map – colouring in the wards as solid blocks to make a choropleth – tends to exaggerate the results in the sparser, larger wards on the edge of the capital. A common alternative, a cartogram, tends to distort the map in such a way that makes it “fairer” but at the expense of ending up with something which is difficult to recognise as a map of a familiar place. My “dots in the centres” approach is the best of both worlds – it works by assigning each ward the same amount of “data impact” on the map, while positioning the results in their correct geographical place.

colourtriangle

Red + Blue = Purple, so a purple dot is where people voted in roughly equal proportions for Labour and the Conservatives, and very few voted for other parties, which would act to make the colour greener. Similarly Red + Green = Brown – an area with little Conservative support. If all three categories have roughly equal numbers of votes, the colour would be grey.

Note that the colour addition technique has a three major flaws. Firstly, people who are colour-blind will struggle to see some of the contrasts. Secondly, the human eye, even for the non colour-blind, perceives colours of the same intensity differently. So, it is difficult to make quantitative judgements on the proportions, based simply on the colour. The third issue is that there are only three primary colours that can be used, which means a maximum of three categories can be visualised in this way. This means lumping in the Lib Dems and UKIP (amongst others) into the same category, which is I’m sure not where they’d want to be.

Let’s take the major parties individually – and this time, vary the areas of each circle by the number of votes received for that party:

labourconservatives

Labour (left) and the Conservatives (right) have strongholds in very different geographies of London – Labour tend to be inner and east, Conservatives outer and west. This tends to mean both parties have a good number of councillors, as their strongly varying popularity, geographically, favours them in the first-past-the-post system.

libdemgreen

The Lib Dem (left) and Green (right) votes are more closely aligned, running roughly on a north-south axis, through the centre of London.

ukip

UKIP’s votes are primarily in outer London only. All their elected councillors were in the outer eastern parts of London, but this graphic shows a quite strong, but “hidden” popularity, in the west and, to a lesser extent, south parts of outer London too.

You can view an interactive version of this map which is zoomable and scrollable, and also has the data for the two previous council elections, in 2010 and 2006. Note the 2010 election was during a general election, so the turnout was generally much higher – this is reflected in the increased sizes of the circles for the individual party maps. Some boundaries have changed between 2010 and 2014 so you’ll see some dots move a bit, as well as change colour.

The data behind these maps was collected from the various council websites over the weekend. I will pass comment on the dramatically varying qualities of the data access on the council sites in a subsequent post, but you can download the data that I did manage to collect, tabulate and normalise, as a tab-delimited 1.2MB text file, suitable for importing into Excel. There are almost 7000 candidates included there, and I am hoping to update it as the final few results come in.

This work was carried out as part of the BODMAS project (Big Open Data Mining & Synthesis) at UCL’s Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA).

Categories
London Technical

Centre of London – the Debate Rumbles On

londoncentre

There’s a lot of ways you can define the centre of London.

The Londonist had a good go last month, and CASA geographer Adam Dennett has a shot too, following an article in today’s Evening Standard newspaper.

  • The former site of the Charing Cross, marked by a plaque in front of the Charles I statue at the small roundabout in Trafalgar Square. It is where distances to “London” are measured to on the UK road network.
  • Trafalgar Square itself as the “focal point” of London events.
  • Centre Point by Tottenham Court Road station (because of the building’s name).
  • Bank junction (because a lot of roads converge at a single point there, and it is the heart of the historic City of London).
  • Farringdon station because that is where Thameslink and Crossrail, London’s two major cross-capital railway lines, will meet.
  • Oxford Circus as this is the busiest tube station on the network.
  • The Londonist definition of Frazier Street near Waterloo, based on the centroid of the Greater London administrative boundary.
  • The Evening Standard definition of a bench on the Victoria Embankment, based on the centroid of the inner London ring road.
  • Adam’s definition which is between Jubilee Gardens and Waterloo, based on the centroid of a weighted population distribution (so the dense inner city populations affect the location more than the sparse surburbs). Jubilee Gardens is just by the London Eye.
  • There are, I’m sure, many others.

I offer an alternative definition – the place which is within London but furthest from the Greater London boundary as the crow flies. A few negative Buffer operations in QGIS reveal that this place, 16.77 km or 10.42 miles from three places on the Greater London border (to the north-east, north and south-west), is Tyler’s Court in Soho , just off Wardour Street – see map above. There is nowhere else in London that is further away from its borders. I don’t think my definition is as geographically appropriate as some of the others above (as it is subject to the whims of the meandering London border more than its area or its population), but certainly if you are ever wandering around Soho on a Saturday evening, it feels a long way from the Great British Countryside.

Image background mapping © OpenStreetMap contributors.

Categories
Data Graphics London

A Census for Open Data in Cities

okfn_census

The Open Knowledge Foundation (OKFN) have produced a census for government open data availability for countries around the world, known as the Open Data Index. Each country is assigned scores for 10 attributes on openness and accessibility for each of 10 types of data (such as election results and pollution information). Currently the United Kingdom is at the top of the table.

More recently, OKFN expanded the concept to look at open data for cities within each country, in other words data that is managed at the City Hall level. For example, there is a project page for individual cities within the UK. This time, 15 types of data are examined, again each gaining up to 10 points for openness. The project is still in its information gathering stage so, at the time of writing, only 6 cities have their data partially, or fully, entered. The census for Italian cities, for example, is looking more complete.

Such a census is of great interest when building an application like CityDashboard, which is currently available for eight cities around the UK. Although CityDashboard doesn’t only use open data sources, those which do have documented APIs, open data licences and machine readable formats greatly aid building and expanding a website such as CityDashboard. CityDashboard takes in social media and sensor data, as well as “official” data of the sort that is being categorised by the OKFN project, but some data, such as live running information for metro services, will quite likely always best come from the official sources.

As such, I will keep a close eye on this project. Cambridge and Sheffield look like two promising cities for which the necessary official data is both available and open, which would make implementing them in CityDashboard relatively straightforward.

The census is user-driven and reviewed, so it’s up to you to get information on the availability (or lack) of data for your local city catalogued in the census.

Categories
Data Graphics London

A Changing City – OS Open Data Reveals a Dynamic London

changingcity_detail

Since launching the data store in early 2010, the Ordnance Survey have been releasing a number of updates to an interesting dataset – VectorMap District – which is a generalisation and simplification of their MasterMap “gold standard” dataset for Great Britain. The updates have been appearing roughly every 6-12 months, and by comparing them in a GIS, you can start to see how places change – at least in the eyes of the Ordnance Survey surveyors tasked to keep the map current. Roads occasionally get built, but building footprints evolve more rapidly – as office blocks and housing developments get taken down and rebuilt with higher capacities or more glass windows.

I’ve taken three of the VectorMap District dataset releases – April 2012, September 2013 and March 2014 – combined the data together and used QGIS’s layer compositing operations to show the geographical differences.

The colours tell of the age of the building – bearing in mind that there is a lag of a few months or years between buildings appearing/disappearing in real life, and on the map. For example, the Olympic Stadium, the turquoise oval above, appears in the 2013 dataset but not the 2012 one, even though of course it was finished in 2011, for the London 2012 Olympic Games.

White Building has existed throughout the three years.
Red Building existed in 2012 only (see note below about extra detail).
Purple Building existed in 2012-2013, but has now gone.
Blue Building was new for 2013, but has now gone.
Turquoise Building was new for 2013, still present (see note below about extra detail).
Green Building is new for 2014, still present.
Yellow Building was around in 2012, disappeared in 2013, but has appeared again now.
Black No building existed in any of the three years.

Above, much of the Olympic Park can be seen – the permanent new buildings (turquoise), temporary buildings for the Games only (blue) and demolished for the games and associated planned development (red). Below, the map covering a wider part of London, zones of activity can be seen. For example, demolition associated with the Nine Elms and Deptford Creek developments (red), and major new blocks such as near the Arsenel stadium (yellow).

Important Note

Between the 2012 and 2013 datasets, the Ordnance Survey changed they way they applied the generalisation on the data, so some of the 2012-2013 changes (shown as red on the maps here for reductions, and turquoise for additions) are as a result of this. For example, narrow gaps between buildings, that always existed, are shown for the first time in 2013 in red (building reductions).

As such, my map slightly overemphasises changes between 2012 and 2013. For example, the pitch at Arsenal and the Great Court at the British Museum appear as changes, but they were always there. As a rough rule of thumb, the smaller red/turquoise patches are due to the generalisation changes, the larger areas of colour show genuine change. With this important caveat, the map remains an interesting insight into London changes, and the larger coloured regions give a good indication of parts of London which are undergoing intensive building redevelopment.

The Bigger Picture

Here is the map for central London – click on it to see a full-size version.

changingcity_overall

Categories
London Technical

37000 Old OS Maps

nls_kew

The National Library of Scotland (NLS) yesterday unveiled a HUGE collection of maps that they have digitised and placed online. The maps, covering England and Wales, are historic Ordnance Survey maps that are between 60 and 170 years old and are at a high resolution. The scale is 6-inch-to-the-mile and covers the whole country. At the moment each map can be viewed by clicking on the appropriate box on an online map, they plan to undertake further work to join many of the maps together to create a single scrollable historic map of the whole country this summer.

The extract above, of the Kew Bridge area in 1899, is from this map (I’ve shifted the white balance.) Some of the maps have some rather nice colouring for water – with the blue colour being augmented by some subtle shading on the riverbanks. The same effect is see in a Snowdon map (extract below), from 1889.

I featured an earlier release of Victorian 60-inch-to-the-mile maps, for London, on Mapping London. The number of retweets and Facebook likes for this posting was unprecedented for the blog, suggesting a huge interest in high quality scans of historic maps.

Here’s their press release, includes the reason why the NLS is including maps from outside Scotland!

New map resource – OS six-inch England and Wales, 1842-1952

We are very pleased to announce the availability of a new website resource – zoomable colour images of the Ordnance Survey’s six-inch to the mile (1:10,560) mapping of England and Wales. All our map digitisation work in recent years has been externally funded, hence the recent expansion of our map images beyond Scotland.

This is the most detailed OS topographic mapping covering all of England and Wales from the 1840s to the 1950s. It was revised for the whole country twice between 1842-1893 and between 1891-1914, and then updated regularly for urban or rapidly changing areas from 1914 to the 1940s. Our holdings are made up of 37,390 sheets, including 35,124 quarter sheets, and 2,237 full sheets.

The maps are immensely valuable for local and family history, allowing most features in the landscape to be shown. The more detailed 25 inch to the mile (or 1:2,500) maps allow specific features to be seen more clearly in urban areas, as well as greater detail for buildings and railways. However, most topographic features on the 25 inch to the mile maps are in fact also shown on the six-inch to the mile maps.

The easiest way of finding sheets is through a clickable graphic index using our ‘Find by Place’ viewer: http://maps.nls.uk/openlayers.cfm?id=39&zoom=6&lat=53.39954&lon=-3.0305

This allows searching through a gazetteer of placenames, street names, postcodes and Grid References, as well as by zooming in on an area of interest with smaller-scale locational mapping as a backdrop.

The sheets are also available via county lists: http://maps.nls.uk/os/6inch-england-and-wales/counties.html

We plan to also make georeferenced mosaics available of the series by the late summer.

OS six-inch England and Wales home page: http://maps.nls.uk/os/6inch-england-and-wales/index.html

Further information: http://maps.nls.uk/os/6inch-england-and-wales/info1.html

nls_snowdon
Categories
Data Graphics London Mashups

Talking Rabbits and Glowing Lamps – The Internet of London Things

At CASA we’ve always been keen on marrying the online with the tangible – such as the London Data Table (a real table, cut in the shape of London, showing live London data), PigeonSim (fly around a Google Earth view augmented with real-time information) and a couple of 3D printers, one of which was used to print the results of an online mapping field project in Lima, Peru, a couple of weeks ago. One of CASA’s core research projects, Tales of Things, is all about this space.

rabbitOver the last couple of days, Steve, boss Andy and I have been working further on linking online and offline London, by making use of Boris, one of the two Karotz Rabbits that have been knocking around the lab for a while (the other one is of course called Ken), plus a couple of wifi-controllable multi-colour Hue lightbulbs that we acquired more recently.

Steve has set up a couple of servers that receive instructions as simple URL requests, format them and pass them to the external company servers that are an inevitable part of most sensor products these days. (In the case of the Karotz server, this usefully turns text into audio files.) The servers then send instructions back into our network and on to the objects themselves.

A few Python scripts later, and we have the following:

  • Boris announces changes to the statuses of the various London Underground lines, when they occur. He also flashes the colour of the affected line as he speaks the message. Between announcements, Boris will pulsate the colour of lines which are not in “Good Service”. His ears also twitch appropriately – appearing fully alert when there are major problems on the network, and a more lackadaisical look when everything’s OK.
  • The first hue lamp, which sits in a spherical orb, shows the weather forecast, as calculated by CASA’s own weather station that sits on the roof of the building opposite. Steve has configured it to show a yellow glow for sunny and dry weather to follow, while a moody blue indicates rain. Disruptive weather, such as likely snowfalls or strong winds, are shown in red, while rain ceasing is green.
  • The second lamp, also in a spherical orb, polls a special Twitter list of active CASA researchers. Every time one tweets, the lamp which change to a particular colour linked to them. For instance, when I tweet about this blogpost, the lamp will turn a distinctive shade of green.

Data Sources

The rabbit, which is in the video above, sits in front of a TV showing CityDashboard, and speaks its wisdom to the office in general from time to time. The video shows him announcing that problems earlier on the Central and District lines are resolved. After the announcement, he goes back to pulsating green to indicate an ongoing District Line issue. The data comes from the tube line status panel on CityDashboard which is itself using the near-live feed from Transport for London’s Developer Area.

The lamps are in the corridor connecting CASA to the rest of the building. As such, it’s often quite a dark place, but now is bathed in an everchanging glow of light based on both sensor data (weather) and social media output (tweets) from our digital city. The Twitter data for the second lamp comes from the London Periodic Table, which accesses the data from Twitter via a proxy server that Steve built. Once a change is detected, another of Steve’s servers is used to send the message to the Hue servers, which then send it back through a special link, to the lamp. Convoluted, but, with a 10-20 second delay, it does work!

Steve has written up a blog post with more details behind the servers that make the system work.

Panos Mavros, a Ph.D student here at CASA, is also using the Hue lamps, in his research into “digital empathy”. He is bringing a whole new meaning to the phrase “mood lighting” – he only has to think and the colours change!

IMG_5532

Categories
Bike Share Data Graphics London

London Cycle Hire on the Cover of BMJ

7946.cover_89I produced this data map which forms the front cover of this week’s British Medical Journal (BMJ). The graphic shows the volumes of Barclays Cycle Hire bikeshare users in London, based on journeys from February 2012 to January 2013 inclusive. The routes are the most likely routes between each pair of stations, as calculated using Routino and OpenStreetMap data. The area concerned includes the February 2012 eastern extension to Tower Hamlets (including Canary Wharf) but not the December 2013 extension to Putney. The river was added in from Ordnance Survey’s Vector Map District, part of the Open Data release. QGIS was used to put together the calculated results and apply data-specified styling to the map.

The thickness of each segment corresponds to the volume of cyclists taking that link on their journey – assuming they take the idealised calculated route, which is of course a not very accurate assumption. Nevertheless, certain routes stand out as expected – the Cycle Superhighway along Cable Street between the City and Canary Wharf is one, Waterloo Bridge is another, and the segregated cycle route south of Euston Road is also a popular route.

The graphic references an article in the journal issue which is on comparing health benefits and disbenefits of people using the system, with comparison to other forms of transport in central London. Pollution data is combined with accident records and models. The paper was written by experts at the UKCRC and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) and I had only a very small part in the paper itself – a map produced by Dr Cheshire and myself was used to illustrate the varying levels of PM2.5 (small particulate matter) pollution in different parts of central London and how these combine with the volume of bikeshare users on the roads and cycle tracks. The journal editors asked for a selection of images relating to cycle hire in London in general and picked this one, as the wiggly nature and predominant red colour looks slightly like a blood capillary network.

A larger version of the graphic, covering the whole extent of the bikeshare system at the time, is here or by clicking on this thumbnail of it:

bmjfinal

Very rare journeys, such as those from London Bridge to Island Gardens, have faded out to such an extent that they are not visible on the map here. An example route, which the map doesn’t show due to this, goes through Deptford and then through the Greenwich Foot Tunnel.

For an interactive version of the graphic (using a slightly older dataset) I recommend looking at Dimi Sztanko’s excellent visualisation.

Categories
Data Graphics London

London North/South

[Buy this print!]

London North/South shows every building block in central and inner city London, coloured blue if it’s north of the River Thames and red if it’s south. And that’s all. No other features are shown, and yet, from this simple premise, a map of the city appears. Almost every street is visible, as a linear white line. Longer lines, with gentler curves, particularly in south London, are often the railways. Stadia are noticeable for generally having a football-field-sized hole surrounded by an often oval block of colour. St Paul’s Cathedral is surprisingly small, but obvious if you know where to look. Big holes in the map are London’s grand parks – Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens being perhaps the most distinctive, as they are surrounded on all sides by densely packed building blocks. A flash of blue appears in the bottom left corner of the map – a mistake? No, the Thames wiggles so much in west London, that this area (Hampton Wick), on the far south of the map, is in fact on the river’s north bank.

The map has 48912 shapes on it – 28200 in blue and 20712 in red. It covers, I think, more than half of London’s eight million plus population, suggesting an average of around 100 people live in each housing block. It does include industrial and commercial buildings, but it’s a fair assumption I think to say that the great majority of buildings in London are residential ones.

The map is centred on a spot just south of Waterloo Railway Station, which is the geographical centroid of Greater London – despite this being south of the river, while the major institutions of the capital – and most of Zone 1 of the tube network – are on the north.

One feature which is on almost all London maps is the River Thames. Famously, when it was removed from the official tube map a few years ago, there was a big outcry and it was hastily restored. This map doesn’t have the Thames on it – but the space through where it runs is obvious. Think of it as being there after all – but coloured white.

I’ve had the graphic professionally litho-printed and it is currently available as a limited edition A2 edge-to-edge print which you can buy from my new online shop, as one of two designs available at the shop’s launch. So far, it’s comfortably outselling the other print which is an update of my Electric Tube design. I think a lot of people like the idea of owning something which has their house on it!

The data comes is Ordnance Survey’s Vector Map District, released under the Open Government Licence. The data is therefore Crown copyright and database right Ordnance Survey 2014. It was prepared in QGIS 2.0, with finishing touches and colouring carried out in Illustrator.

Categories
Data Graphics London

Electric Tube

electric-tube-photo

[Buy this print!]

A couple of years I drew a quirky tube map to commemorate the completing of the circle on London’s Overground, affectionally known as the Ginger Line. The artwork has proven to be quite popular so I’ve produced a print run of an updated version of it. The new version retains the circles, loops and quirks of the original, but I took the opportunity to fix a few lines that weren’t quite right, and throw in a few more wiggles – have a look at that DLR!

Here’s what I wrote previously:

My starting principles for the diagram were concentric circles for the orbital sections of the Circle Line and the Overground network, and straight lines for the Central and Piccadilly Lines, with the latter two converging in the centre of the circles. I then squeezed everything else in. I realised that the Northern Line’s Bank branch passed the Circle Line three times so was going to need something special, so I added a sine wave for this section, and extended this north and south as much as possible.

The River Thames is on there – because any tube diagram doesn’t look correct without the river – and the diagram is topologically accurate – everything connects correctly, and features are in an approximately correct geographical position relative to their neighbours, but not to the diagram overall. Only stations that are designated intersections, or have connections with National Rail stations, are shown. I haven’t labelled anything. It’s art.

I was also thinking about physics when creating the diagram – specifically Feynman diagrams, bubble chamber traces, particle physics collisions, magnetic flow lines and electrical circuit diagrams (as was Beck himself). Hence why I’ve called it the Electric Tube.

The work was also inspired by the likes of Fransicso Dans (more) and Project Mapping, as well as of course the famous Official Tube Map.

The limited edition prints can be bought from my online shop.

electric-tube-detail