London Underground anagram map
parody of the London tube map
London Underground anagram map is a parody map of the London Underground with the station and line names replaced with anagrams. The anagram map was circulated on the web in February 2006.
Controversy
The map was featured on thousands of blogs before a Transport for London lawyer requested that the map be removed. It inspired some people to create anagram versions of their hometown's metro system with similar legal repercussions. The fact that it was appreciated internationally, despite some not knowing the stations behind the anagrams, is a recognition of Harry Beck's iconic Tube map design.
Origin of the anagram map
The map was created by 'Barry Heck' using a photoshopped Tube map and an online anagram generator, on 7 February 2006. It was originally shown in a thread on the Thingbox chat forum and, after being submitted by one of the site owners, appeared on BoingBoing a couple of days later receiving 31,000 hits within the next six days. (The name Barry Heck is a pseudonym chosen because it is an anagram and spoonerism of Harry Beck.)
The idea came from The Great Bear, a 1992 artwork by UK artist Simon Patterson on display at Tate Modern in London, but it was not until Dorian Lynskey's music genre tube map appeared in a newspaper in 2006 that Barry Heck decided to make it.
In 2000, Scottish artist Mark Campbell created the Glasgow Anagram Tour which involved a large light box anagram map of Glasgow and Pop-out Maps with anagrams of Glasgow's cultural establishments which were for sale to commemorate Scotland's Year of the Artist 2000.
Transport for London claimed the image was a copyright infringement and had one of their lawyers ask for the map to be removed from the web.
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This entry incorporates text from “London Underground anagram map” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.