Mapping Britain's Railways: The Design History of a Nation on Track

Featuring hundreds of bold, brightly coloured map images from the British Library and private collections, this book traces the evolution of schematic railway mapping from the 1820s, before Britain’s huge train network was even built, through to the modern era’s digital mapping. The volume features the work of celebrated designers and artists including Harry Beck, Margaret Calvert, Gerry Barney, George Dow, Reginald Montague Lander and Bernard Slatter, and reproduces beautiful graphics and cartography originally published by Bartholomews, Bradshaws and Stanfords on both national and regional scales. Brimming with fascinating, stylish and previously unseen images, Mapping Britain’s Railways shows why designing comprehensible diagrams for complex systems is key to helping passengers find their way and how the most aesthetically pleasing become artworks in their own right.