160 Years of London Underground Design and Architecture
17 March 2027 at 11:00:00
Winston Churchill Hall, Ruislip
The iconic London Underground style on show at Boston Manor tube station
Today’s lecture charts the continuing story of one of the world's most celebrated design achievements, of how it came to be created and of the visionaries who brought it to life: the legendary Frank Pick, who conceptualised the modern Tube's look under the mantra 'the test of the goodness of a design is if it is fit for purpose'; Harry Beck, Tube diagram creator; Marion Dorn, one of the twentieth century's leading textile designers; Edward Johnston, creator of the distinctive font that bears his name; as well as Leslie Green, designer of central London's distinctive red-tiled stations; and not least Edward Holden, who designed the Tube’s iconic roundel logo first seen in the 1920s and now synonymous with London and the London Underground the world over.
Our Speaker today, Mark Ovenden, is a broadcaster and author, who has sold a quarter of a million books and appeared on many TV and radio programmes. He specialises in the subjects of industrial design and architecture, especially in the world of public transport. His first book (a New York Times "Bestseller") was a guide to the maps of Transit systems across the planet and it's been re-issued many times. His works have been translated by Penguin and others into half a dozen languages.
His titles include two books about the Paris Metro and others about Railway Maps; the New York Subway; the London Underground; typeface design; Manchester's Metrolink; Airline Maps; Underground Cities and Cartography design.
He has worked at the BBC, producing programmes for John Peel and Annie Nightingale on Radio 1; in commercial radio as a journalist and newsreader; in television as a researcher and even for MTV as a music programmer. Mark recently fronted his own TV documentary for BBC Four (on the subject of typefaces) and he presented another documentary for BBC Radio 4 on architecture. Other programmes and books are in the works.
Mark Ovenden