Harry Beck Underground station. Beck's home at 60 Courthouse Road, Finchley was marked with a plaque by the Finchley Society in 2003. Since 2001 Transport for London has also started to credit Beck for the original idea on the modern Tube maps. In March 2006 viewers of BBC2's "The Culture Show" and visitors to London's Design Museum voted Harry Beck's Tube map as their second-favourite British design of the 20th century in the Great British Design Quest. The winner was Concorde. In January 2009 the Royal Mail issued a set of postage stamps celebrating British design classics, among them was the contemporary
Harry Beck Beck came up with a new idea for a map that was based upon the concept of an electrical schematic on which all the stations were more-or-less equally spaced rather than a geographic map. Beck first submitted his idea to Frank Pick of London Underground in 1931 but it was considered too radical because it didn't show distances relative from any one station to the others. The design was therefore rejected by the Publicity department at first, but the designer persisted. So, after a successful trial of 500 copies in 1932, distributed via a select few stations, the map was