Posted on: November 6th, 2009 by Jeremy Jackson Sytner

(The point of this slightly verbose blog you need is revealed in the last paragraph.)

You most probably missed ‘London Transport’ last week – part of BBC 4’s Art Deco Icons. I only caught the last 30 minutes. Luckily it’s on BBC’s iPlayer. For a timely lesson in design and marketing I suggest you watch it. I found it inspirational.

The programme centred on the dramatic 1930s London Transport HQ in St James’, London. But for me the revelation was the man behind the building: Frank Pick, managing director of the LER (later London Underground).

A design god.

Unbelievably, he started off by studying law, qualified as a solicitor and then joined the North Eastern Railway as a management trainee. Two years later he was appointed publicity officer with responsibility for the marketing of the Underground Group. He had no experience in the field and only got the job because he complained that the company’s marketing strategy was inconsistent!

His (rare) talent was the ability to assemble a top team of people around him and commission the best artists and designers of the day. (Yes it’s as simple as that.) Add to this an obsessive attention to detail – he was such a stickler for detail that he would turn up in the early hours of the morning on a ‘spot inspection’ of a far flung station to check that the staff had followed his specifications down to the tiniest detail of the signage and litterbins.

In 1902 Nikolaus Pevsner, the architectural historian, described him as “the greatest patron of the arts whom this century has so far produced in England and indeed the ideal patron of our age.”

Apart from the logo and the underground map, he commissioned all those iconic tube stations, the upholstery fabrics, the light fittings – everything.

If that wasn’t enough he was responsible for the London Underground typeface, “designed to optimise legibility for passengers who would see it across crowded platforms or walking briskly.” A variation of Edward Johnston’s typeface ‘Johnston Sans’ is still used by London Underground today.

The undoubted highlight of his legacy, for me, is his ‘publicity posters.’ Pick realised that the easiest way to increase passenger traffic was to persuade them to use it in their leisure time for day trips and weekend jaunts to parks, museums, cinemas, suburban beauty spots and historic houses. Art is the only word to describe them – visit www.ltmcollection.org/posters

My question is why, after all Frank Pick’s dedicated endeavours to create a sublime subterranean environment filled with beautiful and colourful posters, do we have wall to wall ugliness today? Shame on us.