Central London Railway

London, Waterlow and Sons, Ltd, c. 1902. CLR passenger map, sheet size 14.5 x 33 cm, printed in colours, trivial spotting on verso, guide-book issue with blank verso. Leboff and Demuth (‘No Need to Ask’ p. 33) describe this as ‘a new form of map which was to be commonplace until the 1930s... a street layout printed on paper and folded into four, with travel information on the reverse side’. As this is a guide-book issue the information on the verso has been omitted (Passengers were requested not to smoke in the lifts and to refrain from spitting, and sensible restrictions were placed on baggage, banning ‘heavy and bulky luggage [which] cannot be carried without inconvenience to Passgengers’). However, this Central London Railway map remains innovative for two reasons: firstly, the CLR paved the way in giving maps away to passengers, something which we now take for granted but which only became viable as printing became cheaper; secondly, they also established a precdent for distributing quantities of their official map at no charge to commercial publishers to be bound into guide books. Presumably it was seen as free advertising, and it became a standard practice for London Transport and its predeccessors in the first half of the 20th cnetury. Map