The London Underground map has been reimagined in a ‘circles and spokes’ design by a university lecturer, and since being shared online has caused quite a stir.

Within 24 hours of sharing his alternative design of the famous Tube map, psychology lecturer Maxwell Roberts’ post went viral, receiving over a million engagements.

His version uses concentric circles to represent the various Tube lines, as opposed to the straight lines used in the 1933 Tube map by Harry Beck, currently used by Transport for London (TfL).

Sharing via X and LinkedIn, Maxwell, from Walton-on-the-Naze, criticised the official London Underground map for being ineffective.

“It has poor balance, simplicity, coherence and topographical accuracy,” he said. “It fails by any criterion of effectiveness you can imagine and has been in a neglected state of decline for years.”

“I caused a stir a few years ago calling it a ‘garbage piece of lazy design‘ and nothing has happened since to change my mind.”

He first redesigned the map in a circular structure back in 2013, when he placed Tottenham Court Road at the centre and built his map around the station.

Eleven years later, he chose to update it, after TfL released its own “circles” version earlier this year. He describes his revamped version as “more geographically accurate than the official map.”

Image: Maxwell Roberts

The map has sparked conversations online, with some commenters declaring a refreshed map as “desperately needed”. Others have felt inspired by the redesign, relating it to professional creativity and problem solving.

One person commented, “The attention to detail and the thought process behind this design truly highlight the power of combining creativity with practical solutions.”

Another said: “Your circular [map] makes London feel friendly and easy to move around in again. I imagine adding bike and walking tracks – to point out the short distances between popular areas…”

In an article on LinkedIn, Maxwell describes in detail the rationale for his map design, which many have found fascinating.

An extract from his essay:

“What I did do with this map was break my own design rules at a very early stage. I had resolved not to attempt a circular Circle Line so as not to build the potential for topographical disasters into my design priorities. However, using spokes for the sides of the Circle Line, radiating from the centre, splayed out the sides. This would have caused their own topographical issues. You can see this from an early test sketch. Having discarded the idea of spokes early for these regions of London, other locations followed suit. Some straight lines became tangents to curves (e.g. the Piccadilly Line at Holborn) and others were angled to be in parallel with true spokes nearby (e.g. the north London leg of the Jubilee Line is not a spoke, but matches the Northern Line Edgware branch). Sticking to these deviations gave me intellectually defensible ways to break the rules. I was not permitting myself an ‘anything goes’ free-for-all and this kept the design orderly.”

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