Travel by Tube

Which actu­ally, I didn’t on this trip to Lon­don, pre­fer­ring to use my free bus pass and enjoy the super­ior views.  But the spe­cial poster exhib­i­tion at the Lon­don Trans­port Museum (extremely well refur­bished since I was there last) was a nos­tal­gic joy.  The his­tory of the use of ima­gin­at­ive posters to encour­age travel by train, tube and bus was laid out, with use­ful dis­cus­sion on tech­nique. Some less suc­cess­ful were included — they weren’t all crowd pullers but their range and vari­ety was quite aston­ish­ing, even to someone like me who had been used to see­ing them on sub­way walls. Most of the artists had got the mes­sage to keep it simple — not a lot of text, but a simple few word text.  Etern­ally grate­ful to Frank Pick who com­mis­sioned all the early works espe­cially for LT