Ordnance Survey: London Underground Railways Plans

OS 7

1948

Ordnance Survey five-foot maps of London, with coloured manuscript additions showing underground railways. For the eastern end of the Central Line, sheets of the Ordnance Survey 1:2,500 County Series for Essex were used as the base maps.

As well as London Transport Underground lines, there are maps showing the Kingsway Subway (a tramway tunnel), the Post Office Railway, and the Waterloo and City Railway (then part of British Railways, Southern Region). A separate set of maps is used for each line. Details shown include the overall width of tunnels and the layouts of stations, including the positions of stairs, escalators and passageways for public use. Shafts and tunnels bored purely for construction reasons are not shown. The dates given in the catalogue entries are those when the annotations were made.

For a file contaning information relating to the preparation of these maps, see: OS 1/135

Public Record(s)

English

15 file(s)

Topics

Railways

Maps and plans

Communications

Ordnance Survey maps of London at the scale of five feet to one mile (1:1,056) originally showed surface features of railways and the sub-surface portions of the 'cut-and-cover' lines, but not the deep-level tube lines. In 1947, it was decided to collect information about all London Transport lines and annotate a set of maps at the five-foot scale with this information. The maps produced for the Metropolitan and District Lines were used as a source when it was decided in 1955 to indicate the positions of these lines on the 1:1,250-scale National Grid series maps.