Titan of the Tube: Frank Pick

November 2010
Titan of the Tube: Frank Pick
LONDON
HISTORIANS
HISTORIANS
OF LONDON
by Christian Wolmar
V
irtually every Londoner will daily come across an aspect of
Frank Pick’s legacy, and yet few will be aware of it. Without
Pick, we would not have the roundel, that iconic representation
of the London Underground, the famous Tube map, the typeface
in which the station signs are written or the art deco stations that
pepper the outer reaches of the Central and Piccadilly lines.
However, few Londoners will have any knowledge of the man
whose influence still permeates the capital. For much of the first
forty years of the 20th century, Frank Pick was the hand on the tiller
of London’s transport system and created a structure from which
Londoners still benefit. Pick was the epitome of a type of public
servant which has long disappeared. He had both the freedom to
make a real difference informed by an ethos of serving the public
untrammelled by narrow commercial interests.
Pick’s collaboration with architects such as Charles Holden in the
1930s gave London’s tube stations their distinctive art deco look.
Pick started out in 1906 as an assistant to Sir George Gibb who
was appointed as chairman of the Underground Electric Railways
Company, the precursor to London Underground, which at the time
already controlled four lines. Gibb brought in another young talent,
Albert Stanley, later Lord Ashfield, and he formed a remarkable
partnership with Pick that was to last until the outbreak of the
Second World War.
Within a couple of years, Pick was charged with promoting the
‘Underground group’ and by the outbreak of the First World War
the first of many Pick innovations was being introduced, the roundel
whose design, incidentally, was originally based on a similar device
used by a bus company. Various versions were tried and used over the
Frank Pick (1878 - 1941)
© TfL from the London Transport Museum collection
years, with probably the most notable being the one with the big L
and D at the beginning of the London Underground wording. There
were other more mundane improvements, such as the introduction
of strip tickets – now known as carnets – or the ‘next lift’ illuminated
signs to ensure people knew where to queue. It was very much a
team effort. Many of the ideas came from Stanley but he soon rose
to become chairman of the Underground Group and mixed with
the higher echelons of the establishment, wheeling and dealing to
fantastic effect, while Pick implemented the policies.
Pick was responsible for the tidying up of the Underground map
which had previously been a rather messy imposition of coloured
lines on a faint background of London’s street pattern. Instead, a
design by Harry Beck, based on electric circuitry, and schematic
rather than representational, was adopted and not only survives,
albeit with many additions, to this day, but is the model for countless
other public transport maps across the world. The Johnston typeface
was another Pick innovation, a way of unifying the image of London.
Pick understood the idea of corporate identity and the importance of
logos long before these became standard parts of business practice,
and all while in the service of a publicly owned body.
Frank Pick’s instinct for good design also gave us the iconic big-U big-D underground logo and the London Transport typeface (Johnston).
Frank Pick’s instinct for good design also gave us the iconic big-U
big-D underground logo, the London Transport typeface (Johnston)
and Harry Beck’s underground map.
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LONDON
Titan of the Tube (cont.)
HISTORIANS
HISTORIANS
OF LONDON
Picture: Russ Willey.
He was tireless, walking bus routes, checking fire buckets, ensuring
escalators were not out of service for any longer than necessary and
so on. Remarkably, Pick met both Stalin, whom he advised on the
Moscow metro, and Hitler, at a conference in Berlin, during the
thirties. The period under Ashfield and Pick was London Transport’s
heyday as, with cash available from job stimulation programmes,
tube lines were expanded and new bus routes introduced. The war,
unfortunately, brought the investment programmes to an abrupt
halt and LT never regained its pre-war glory.
Pick’s collaboration with architects such as Charles Holden in the 1930s gave
London’s tube stations their distinctive art deco look.
The pinnacle of the Pick – Ashfield partnership was the creation in
1933 of London Transport which brought together all the disparate
parts of London’s transport network – tube, buses, trams, coaches,
etc – under one integrated nationalised system with Ashfield as
chairman and Pick as the chief executive. It was a role to which
Pick, who was painfully shy and often ate alone in the officers’ staff
restaurant, was eminently suited. While he was the backroom boy,
he was nevertheless confident of his own power and able – and
eager - to make decisions. Pick wanted a single brain, presumably
his, to run the massive new organisation and described his job, to
his biographer Christian Barman, as ‘day to day [having] to find
answers to a continuous stream of questions about staff, finance,
traffic, engineering, publicity, supplies …in no sense am I an expert.
I can obtain advice wherever I want it. I merely have to decide, but
in deciding I become responsible for my own decisions’. It is about
as good a job description for the role of chief executive in a public
body as any, a blueprint for others to follow.
Sadly, shortly after the outbreak of the war, Ashfield fell out with
Pick over a matter to do with pensions and Pick, who had been ill
for some time, died in 1941.
Pick may seem to come from a distant era, but actually it is not
that far off. In 2005, after I gave an illustrated talk on the London
Underground in Freiburg in southern Germany that included a
picture of Pick, an old lady came up to me and said ‘Before I came,
I had no idea that you would mention Frank Pick but I recognised
him from the picture in your talk’. I asked how and she said: ‘When
I was a little girl before the Second World War, he lived next door
and he always used to give me a Christmas present’. For once I was
lost for words. There was no little irony that it was in a town where
the excellent integrated transport was organised in a way far closer
to Pick’s principles than anywhere in the UK that I came within one
step of the great man.
About Christian Wolmar
Christian Wolmar is a journalist and broadcaster, and the author of a series of books on railways and their history. The
Subterranean Railway was published in 2004 and his latest, Engines of War, how wars were won and lost on the railways, has
just been published by Atlantic Books.
© 2010 Christian Wolmar. Reproduction in whole or in part by permission of Christian Wolmar or London Historians Limited.
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