How many Underground stations have classic tiles on the walls, then? As far as we can recall, it’s just the Piccadilly, Northern and Bakerloo lines that have wall tile patterns, and we can’t find anywhere online that documents which stations have which tile patterns which is why we’ve now started work on this – a tube map which shows you the tile pattern for that station.  Your life isn’t going to be complete without it is it?

With apologies to this being a link on the Daily Mail website (because it’s the only place we can find it), but a web developer called Chris Gray has made a global tube map – linking up all the countries in the world, with a Beck style map.

World Tube Map

“Chris Gray, 47, came up with his whimsical idea for the map when watching a cricket match in Australia

I was sat in Melbourne after watching England lose another test and thought it would be great to nip over to England for Christmas and New Year and then go back to the sun, so I came up with the idea of a world Underground and started drawing it”.

Read http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2598871/Maps-reveal-WORLD-connected-using-global-underground-network.html.

This weekend’s alternative tube map comes courtesy of artist Tim Fishlock who has created this piece for the ‘Mind the Map’ exhibition for the London Transport Museum.

It’s been doing the rounds on Twitter for a while, so thought it was about time that we featured it here.

A to Z Mind the Map

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A man that we follow on Twitter just to see what map he’ll produce next is Mike Hall.

Mike’s a freelance designer and has been painstakingly creating large poster maps of each of the London boroughs – all by hand.  Each map has a different design and theme, drawing on the most famous aspects of the borough, but of course what we really love about them is how the railways are perfectly drawn and the tube stations accurately shown.

Mike Hall Map

More maps of London are over on this website, you can even buy them to have as physical poster from his online shop.

Another Saturday, another alternative tube map .. this time a freshly served up new one as the Stylight website brings us the fashionista tube map.

“All the fashionistas flock from Covent Norgaarden station to get to London Fashion Week’s Somerset House, and after a long day of shopping in the West End, they relax with a drink in the Jimmy Choo-dge Street area, before catching a train home a few stops down the Conde Northern line at Waterlooloo Guinness – London: style capital of the world.”

Fasionista Tube Map

Here’s a fun thing that we found out about yesterday … make your own custom tube map based upon your friends, using Facebook.

Hop over to the Underground Mapper website, where if you login using your Facebook account it looks at your list of friends and works out how they’re connected and who knows who – and then you get your own personalised tube map, with all your friends listed as stations on it.

Underground Mapper

David Johnston who created the site got the idea when he realised that people at his work always got moved around on various projects, and always wondered how a map might look if everyone was assigned a station like a tube map, if each line were a project.

Analysing someone’s Facebook data was something that was quite easy to do via the Facebook API, which can be accessed and the data pulled for making a map, once a user has given their permission.

David says that people are quite often surprised about some of the connections between their friends that the map reveals.

For a small fee, they’ll even make you a large poster sized version which they’ll send to you. Perfect gift idea? Or just one for the tube geeks!? Follow them at @ugmapper for more.

When we made our Tube Strike map a few weeks ago, it was picked up on, championed and re-tweeted lots by the nice people at Infogr8 – who have just released ‘The state of #dataviz in 2014‘ – and they nicely features us, along with the map, so we thought we’d do the nice thing and plug them back, and to mention to take a look at the rather good PDF they’ve just produced with all manner of data stories for you to feast upon (including ourselves!).

Infogr8