Harry Beck Harry Beck Henry Charles Beck (4 June 1902 – 18 September 1974), known as Harry Beck, was an English technical draughtsman best known for creating the present London Underground Tube map in 1931. Beck drew up the diagram in his spare time while working as an engineering draftsman at the London Underground Signals Office. London Underground was initially sceptical of Beck's radical proposal, an uncommissioned spare-time project, but tentatively introduced it to the public in a small pamphlet in 1933. It was immediately popular, and the Underground has used topological maps to illustrate the network ever since. Prior to the
R. J. Mitchell home he had built to his own design, Hazeldene, at 2 Russell Place. An English Heritage blue plaque was dedicated there on September 8, 2005, a week before the 65th anniversary of the Battle of Britain. Earlier that year a blue plaque from the Newcastle Civic Society was dedicated at Mitchell's first home in Butt Lane. Gordon Mitchell told his father's story in a 1986 book, revised in 1997 and updated in 2002 as "R. J. Mitchell: Schooldays to Spitfire". In 1986, Mitchell was inducted into the International Air & Space Hall of Fame at the San Diego Air &