Rita Keegan designed Tube map pays homage to Tube seat designs
An artwork by leading London artist Rita Keegan, inspired by the fabrics of the Tube’s seats, will be on the cover of the 40th pocket Tube map which has been launched this month. This is part of TfL’s Art on the Underground programme. The new map will be the first to feature the new names and colours of the Overground lines.
The Fabric of Time, follows the previous work from Rita Keegan, exploring memory, history, dress, and adornment, often through her family archive. Her work combines different mediums including textiles, painting, copy art, and media experimentation.
The Fabric of Time draws on her photographs of London from the 1980s as well as the history of the seat fabrics on the Tube. Keegan’s design for a pocket Tube Map is the first to contain the new names and colours of the six Overground lines, Liberty, Lioness, Mildmay, Suffragette, Weaver, and Windrush, which launch in a “historic change for London’s transport network,” according to TfL.
“The work holds multiple moments and histories in one image,” TfL says in a press release, “bringing a personal record into public view and the significance of place and history. The work focuses on the fabric people sit on daily, an acknowledgement of time spent in transit and the things people may miss experiencing as they go about their habitual encounters. The work also celebrates the numerous moquette designers, many of them women and who were not all credited in archives at the time.”
The pocket Tube Map will also coincide with the centenary of McNish’s birth. The featured design samples Keegan selected were also inspired by the history of design on the Tube and the direction of influential former London Transport chief executive Frank Pick.
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