On Monday the 2nd January 1979, Eiichi Kono walked into the offices of Banks and Miles, one of London’s most renowned graphic design agencies. It was his first day at the firm as a typographer, and he was very excited. Admittedly Eiichi didn’t actually know what he’d be working on – they’d been slightly vague about that – but he was excited nonetheless. This would represent his first major typographical job, and that was something he’d been working towards for some time.

Eiichi had been working in the optical printing industry in his native Japan for some years when, in the mid-seventies, he had experienced what he would later describe as a “mid-career crisis.” Switching directions, he decided to explore a career in something that had fascinated him for some time – typography.

He chose to begin his journey into the world of typography at the London College of Printing – a choice partially motivated by memories of previous time spent in London. Visiting the city on holiday he had, like many tourists, found the transport network rather daunting. His initial apprehension though soon disappeared. The ever-present roundels, he discovered, made stations easy to locate and identify and the easy-to-read signage really impressed him.

“The symbol was accompanied with a simple, elegant, slightly old-fashioned alphabet.” He would later write, “At first, I thought it was Gill Sans; it wasn’t Futura, and definitely not my then favourite, Helvetica.”

The typeface was, of course, Johnston Sans and, although Eiichi didn’t know it at the time, it was a typeface created by Edward Johnston and unique to the London Underground. It was this typeface that helped motivate him into becoming a typographer and indirectly this that meant when Colin Banks (one of his course assessors and the “Banks” part of Banks & Miles) offered him a job as a typographer post-graduation, he leapt at the chance.

It was also this typeface, Colin Banks told him when he arrived, that Eiichi would be working on. He had been hired to redesign Johnston Sans.

“That morning,” says Eiichi, “was a bit of a shock.”

Going Back to the Beginning

Eiichi’s shock at being asked to redesign a simple typeface may seem a bit over the top. In part, this is because typography (and indeed professional writing in general) is no longer as dark an art as it used to be – the modern computer has put an end to that. In the main, however, this is because few people realise just how much of an important typographical – and indeed historical – landmark the humble “Underground Font” really was. Created almost 100 years ago, in design terms Johnston Sans literally helped create the modern world.

So perhaps before we continue our look at Eiichi’s role in Johnston’s history, we should take a trip back to the very beginning. A beginning that, slightly strangely, begins in 1908 not with the man who actually created Johnston, but with a man who just thought it was about time there was some bloody design consistency on the Underground – Frank Pick.

Pick had started working at the “Underground Electric Railways Company of London” (as it was then known) back in 1906, but it was after his appointment to the position of Publicity Manager in 1908 that he really began to leave his mark on the railway. In a career that would eventually span over 30 years, Pick would be directly or indirectly responsible for creating almost all the iconography we now associate with the Underground – the Roundel, the map, the moquette, the famous posters – all Pick’s work in some way. Pick wasn’t a designer himself, but he knew a good one when he saw one and – perhaps more importantly – he believed in a couple of simple design concepts that seem obvious now but which were almost revolutionary back then.

Corporate Design, Pick believed, should be consistent, it should be easy to grasp and (almost above all else) it should look good.

This belief grew, in part, from work Pick carried out on promotional poster campaigns for the Underground in 1908. Noting the success of a similar campaign carried out by the North Eastern Railway, Pick commissioned a series of posters depicting the various interesting landmarks and locations Londoners could get to by Tube. Pick tried to ensure that all the posters produced were of a very high visual quality, and the campaign was a success. It was even more successful, he noticed, when he took things further and made sure that the posters were well illuminated and positioned with an eye to where they would actually be noticed – a principle that over the next few years he extended to maps and signage.

By 1912, therefore, with a reputation high from his successes and a growing understanding of the power of good design and usability, Pick was finally able to turn his attention to something that had been bugging him since his very first poster campaign – the multitude of differing typefaces featured across the Underground.

Pick had first really noticed this when he had commissioned his original poster campaign – the designs that came back were all good (hardly surprising given his ability to spot talent), but they often featured differing text styles – something that he felt came across as a bit sloppy. Further years as the Underground’s growing design star had only reinforced this belief – not only did the inconsistency in typefaces everywhere look a bit haphazard, but it also served as a permanent and unwelcome reminder of the Underground’s origins as a number of smaller rivals. When the typefaces were bad, Pick also noted, they genuinely adversely affected passenger’s journeys and that was bad for both commuter and company. Pick decided that the Underground needed a consistent typeface and he was going to give it one. Making this happen, however, soon turned out to be harder than Pick had originally thought.

In his quest for a typeface Pick turned his gaze onto the various options already available but soon he realised that nothing really matched up to what he wanted. The closest Pick found to a an already-existing typeface that felt right was the one recently created for WH Smith by the famous (and posthumously infamous) type designer Eric Gill. It wasn’t quite what he wanted though and because WH Smith was already becoming a feature of station forecourts anyway he rejected it, feeling that it would confuse passengers.

Pick even briefly tried to turn his hand to creating a typeface of his own, based entirely on circles and squares, but soon realised that his skills lay very definitely in concepts not actualities.

Finally, in 1913, Pick realised that (as always) the solution to the problem was to do what he always did – hire someone good and get something brand new made just for him. As usual, Pick soon found himself briefing the perfect candidate for the job – Edward Johnston.

Creating the Typeface

By 1913 Johnston was a man already making a name for himself in the world of type. Then 35, Johnston had only really discovered his talent for (and love of) typography in his mid-twenties. By 1906, however, he had already been recognised as a man who had almost single-handedly revived and rediscovered the art of calligraphical type and lettering, and was the much-loved teacher of many of print’s future greats – including Thomas Cobden-Sanderson and the aforementioned Eric Gill. Johnston’s book, Writing and Illuminating, and Lettering would be (and indeed still is) one of the “must read” texts for anyone in the typographical world.

Pick met Johnston via a mutual acquaintance – Gerald Meynell, who owned the Westminster Press. That meeting, combined with Pick’s assessment of Johnston’s abilities and recommendations from several of Johnston’s former pupils (including Gill), soon made Pick realise that he had found his man.

The typeface should have “the bold simplicity of the authentic lettering of the finest periods” Pick wrote to Johnston. It should also, he told him, be easy to read from a moving train and in bad lighting, be noticeably up-to-date with the times, and yet also be completely different from anything found on other shops and signage. Finally, in true Frank Pick style, Johnston was told that each letter should be “a strong and unmistakeable symbol.”

It was a brief that many a designer would have blanched at, but not Johnston.

It took three years (in fact all likelihood it probably didn’t – Johnston was notorious for leaving commissions until the very last minute), but in 1915 Johnston delivered to Pick a character-set that met every single one of those demands. Pick was, quite simply, delighted.

Little documentation remains covering the design process undertaken by Johnston whilst working on Pick’s new typeface. What is obvious, however, is that Johnston – a man, remember, who had form for reviving lost arts and styles – decided that he’d do exactly the same thing again. For what Johnston created for Pick was the very first modern “Sans-Serif” typeface.

Sans-Serif’s are “fonts without the little kicks.” Open up a word processing program and print out this article in Times New Roman. Then print it out in Arial (or Helvetica if you’re on a Mac) and look at the difference – you’ll see that the letters in the Times version are slightly more ornate around the edges. This is because Times is a “Serif” font and Arial is Sans-Serif. In the simplest, most generic terms, this is the difference between the two families.

Sans-Serif typefaces, therefore, are those “flourishless” families like Verdana, Arial, Helvetica and (one for Windows Vista users) Calibri. Faces that bless documents everywhere and virtually the entire internet. Sans-Serif faces are, in many ways, the living embodiment of text in the 21st Century and Johnston, with the typeface that he delivered to Pick, almost singlehandedly revived them as a valid and useful style.

Johnston would later admit to two influences on the design of his typeface – walking home one evening with Eric Gill in the early 1900s, he found himself focusing on the various tradesmen’s wagons that featured simply drawn signage in sans-serif style. “Here, on their covers,” Johnston would later say, “in one small backwater of the lettering trade, tradition had preserved an otherwise extinct species; a really good block letter.”

Having settled on producing a sans-serif face, Johnston’s other big influence was the lettering on Trajan’s Column. From there he took the principle of classical dimensions and extended it all the strokes on his new typeface would be the same width, and the circles (on the “o” and “p” for example) should be exactly that – perfect circles.

The resulting typeface that Johnston delivered to Pick (uppercase in 1915, lowercase a year later), is the fruit of those influences, but also has its own unique touches. Next time you look at the tube map look at the letters i and j in lowercase – you’ll notice that the dots are actually diagonal squares – a touch that hints at the broad-nibs of Johnston’s calligraphical past. Other little touches like the hooked base to the lower-case “l” give the face personality, whilst also helping to meet Pick’s goal that each letter be subtly distinguishable at speed (although Johnston admitted he did this partially to stop bad typesetters putting his ‘l’s too close to other letters, one of his pet peeves). Overall, Johnston delivered a magnificent typeface, and Pick quickly set about ensuring that it manifested across the entire network, furthering its fame and helping kick off a worldwide sans-serif revolution.

As if accomplishing the above was not enough, Johnston then finished it all off by creating the Roundel.

All of which brings us, nicely, back to Eiichi Kono.

Reinventing a Classic

Eiichi’s shock is now hopefully more understandable – he was not simply being asked to rework an old typeface, he was being asked to touch up an acknowledged “Old Master.”

If Johnston’s creation was so good though, why was Eiichi being told to work on it?

Partly this was due to changing technology. The typeface still only existed in the form of wooden and metal printing blocks for each letter, whilst the world had moved on to photographic printing methods.

It was also, however, because the typeface was increasingly being called upon to appear in places and positions for which it had never been designed. The documents, signage and advertising campaigns that London Underground were now producing increasingly pushed the limits of the typeface. It wasn’t good in very small print, for example, and it lacked variable weights (such as a bold version) and italics.

None of this was really Johnston’s fault – he’d been asked to design something that would work on signage and in headlines and that was precisely what he’d delivered. Indeed he’d actually called it “Underground Railway Block Letter” – almost expressly indicating that he didn’t regard it as a complete typeface.

Other typographers had stepped in over the years (including Percy Delf Smith, one of Johnston’s pupils) to extend it at different times. By the 70s though, London Underground’s advertising agencies were getting increasingly frustrated at its inflexibility and (in a move that would have had Frank Pick spinning in his grave) abandoning it all together. Its internal use was also becoming increasingly half-hearted.

It was clear that a decision needed to be made on the future of Johnston Sans and London Underground approached various graphic design agencies and consulted on the subject. Many recommended dropping it completely in favour of other faces (Helvetica was considered, as was Univers Bold) but ultimately one agency – Banks and Miles – stepped forward and suggested an alternative:- Rework Johnston into a proper, fully extended, typeface.

Johnston wasn’t just a typeface, they insisted, it was now part of the London Underground. Get rid of Johnston they claimed and you’d diminish slightly everyone’s very impression of what constitutes the Tube.

“It is perfectly reasonable for designers to want to change things and make their mark,” John Miles would later say, “but not changing something is a perfectly legitimate design decision. It can sometimes be better to retain the existing core and make modifications – and perhaps improvements around the edges.”

Banks and Miles’ arguments ultimately won out, and London Underground gave them an almost Pick-like broad brief to rework Johnston. Luckily, in Banks & Miles, they had found a company who understood the overall ethos that Pick had been after, and which was still – with modification – relevant today.

In the person of Eiichi Kono, Banks & Miles themselves had also been lucky. They had found someone up to the mammoth task with which he had been presented – although he wasn’t entirely confident that he was up to the job at the time.

“The prospect was daunting,” he would later write, “because I had no experience in type design and very little English language. There had been no serious typeface design project in my design school days, and I expected that in the office there would be at least a kind of preliminary training or what drawing tools to be used, what guidance for a novice designer ‒ size the original artwork should be, how to typeset with newly drawn letters. I remembered one college day in 1975 when our tutor took us to the drawing office of the Monotype Corporation in Salfords. They had impressive purpose-built drawing equipment, precision machines and many skilled draughtsmen and women. In contrast, my tools were very basic: pencils, felt tip pens, a Rotring pen with 0.1 mm nib, Winsor & Newton’s fine brushes and some photographic equipment in the darkroom.”

Over the next 18 months, however, (and after overcoming his initial shock), Eiichi effectively rebuilt Johnston from the ground up.

He studied what documentation and ideas Johnston had left, and drew and traced letters by hand before filling them in with pen and altering them through photography and photocopy, creating new weights and experimenting to find sizes and standards that worked.

He soon found, to his sadness, that in some cases Johnston’s original rules had to be adapted or ignored – some of the Trajanic proportions had to be lost in order to make the typeface work well at lower point sizes with the x-height (the height of the “sticks” on letters such as “h”) having to be changed as well.

In the end though Eiichi was able to produce the first truly complete Johnston Typeface, which Banks & Miles christened “New Johnston.”

London Underground were delighted. Johnston would endure.

The Evolving Typeface

Some purists argue that because it contains changes to elements such as the x-height, New Johnston is a corruption of Edward Johnston’s original work, and in the strictest of terms they may well be correct – something Eiichi himself would freely admit to.

As Mike Ashworth, London Underground’s Head of Design and Heritage (and one of New Johnston’s current guardians) points out though, Johnston himself would probably disagree with that assessment.

“As a typeface,” Ashworth says, “Johnston underwent plenty of changes throughout the twenties and thirties and Edward Johnston himself was nearly always complicit in the process – I’ve been lucky enough to read some of the letters.”

“Johnston is an evolved and evolving typeface,” he continues, “and always was.”

The “evolving” part of the statement above is obviously still pertinent. Whilst Eiichi leaves our story now having successfully reinvigorated Johnston for the modern technical revolution, Johnston itself has not remained unchanged.

“Frankly,” Ashworth continues, “the Johnston typeface has seen more change in the last eight years than in the previous eighty. It’s to the credit of Johnston – both typeface and creator – that it’s kept its honesty and recognition throughout.”

Those changes aren’t simply typographical. The transition to modern, computerised digital format was largely a painless one, thanks to a continuing relationship with Banks & Miles and the quality, documentation and methods used by Eiichi Kono when creating New Johnston. A more complex change arose, however, with the creation of Transport For London in the late nineties.

Whilst Johnston (or variations of it) had been used on non-Underground transport before (Johnston himself designed a condensed version for bus-blinds in the twenties), suddenly a serious question arose – should Johnston be confined to London Underground, or should it become the official typeface of this entirely new consolidated organisation?

“It was a big thing to consider,” Ashworth explains, “if it was to be the house style everywhere, then there were genuine fears we’d be asking too much of it. It worked well on the Underground, but if we started putting it on the License Notices of black cabs, would we have been taking away some of its power?”

Eventually though the decision was taken to do exactly that – a new version of Johnston went organisation-wide as “TfL New Johnston,” and few can argue that it hasn’t stood up to the challenge admirably.

Into The Future

Today, Johnston remains a fundamental part of the London scene, a situation that TfL are keen to ensure continues, although not at the expense of the enduring fidelity of the typeface itself.

“We continue to make subtle changes” Ashworth admits, “but we’re very wary about doing too much and are always happy to roll back changes if they end up not feeling ‘right.’

“The most recent major change was to the numbers 1 and 4 earlier this year. Not a lot of people noticed until a poster appeared advertising engineering work on Valentines Day – then I got a lot of emails!”

Going forward, Johnston and its role will undoubtedly undergo changes again – we would wager that, as website handling of embedded fonts changes, the TfL website itself may begin to show more of its true typographical colours.

As with many things on the underground, however, the important thing is finding the balance between heritage and functionality.

The heritage and importance of the Johnston typeface cannot be denied – the result of the vision of Frank Pick and the brilliance of Edward Johnston. Indeed Johnston’s creative skills are perhaps best memorialised by the blue heritage plaque that graces his former residence in Hammersmith – the only blue plaque to feature text in a custom typeface (you can probably guess which one).

The functionality comes from the impressive work of Eiichi Kono and others in ensuring that the typeface has maintained its usability in the modern world.

It is TfL and London Underground, of course, that need to ensure that this balance is found going forward – a role that, for now at least – they appear to take very seriously indeed.

“I believe that the ultimate test as to whether we are doing our job properly,” Mike Ashworth concludes, “is whether a sign containing a new variant of Johnston can be placed on a platform wall and not look incongruous with the signage that has been on that platform for twenty years or more. If it does, then we need to think again.”

“In fact,” he admits, “I can think of a couple of places where Metronet accidentally used the public version of the typeface licensed by the London Transport Museum, and even they don’t look out of place.

“And no,” he adds after a brief pause, “before you ask, I’m not going to tell you where they are!”

If you spot them commentors, do let us know.

This article first appeared on London Reconnections, a site dedicated to news and long-form writing about London Transport

When the architecture of the Underground is discussed, it is nearly always to the work of Charles Holden that comment turns. The reasoning for this, of course, is obvious. In the likes of Gants Hill, Arnos Grove and 55 Broadway, Holden left an architectural legacy that few other 20th Century figures could match. Holden’s legacy, however, often serves to distract from the work of another young architect roughly ten years before him. A man who would arguably do more to define the public image of the London Underground than any other figure with the possible exception of Frank Pick.

That man was Leslie Green.

In four short years, Green would be responsible for the design and execution of over fifty stations spread over three separate Tube lines – a remarkable achievement for a man who was only 29 when he was first given the task and one which would, in many ways, ultimately lead to his tragically early death at the age of 33. For many his distinctive red stations would become – and indeed remain – the stereotypical template of an Underground station.

A Boy from Maida Vale

Much of Green’s life remains hidden in obscurity – no doubt in part due to his relatively early death. Indeed in contrast to the likes of Holden, Pick and Johnston, few pictures of the man are known to exist.

Born on the 6th February 1875 in Maida Vale, a career in architecture seemed likely from a very young age for Leslie Green. He was the son of Arthur William Green – a prominent architect and Crown Surveyor – and after completing his schooling Green immediately joined his father’s firm where he worked as an apprentice. In 1893, with an architectural career now a certainty, he spent a year at the South Kensington School of Art and then another studying architecture in Paris. Finally, in 1895, he returned to his father’s firm in London.

An apprentice no longer, Green would work as his father’s assistant on several major design projects but by 1897 was already moving towards practising under his own name. By 1900, now a member of the Royal Institute of British Architects, Green was working on his own architectural projects out of offices on the Strand and for the next three years he would quietly develop a reputation as a calm and efficient architectural operator. By 1903 Green had a fair portfolio of successful work, although one that contained no real large scale projects. That was a situation that changed almost overnight, however, when, in September of that year, he was hired by transport mogul Charles Tyson Yerkes.

The Robber Baron

It is impossible to continue Green’s story without pausing briefly to look at Yerkes himself. A man who built, then lost, then rebuilt his own personal fortune, Yerkes has become a legendary figure in his own right. By the time he arrived in London from his native USA, Yerkes had already built and lost a brokerage empire in Philadelphia, spent time in jail for financial fraud, been caught blackmailing elected officials and created Chicago’s public transport system.

Sensing an opportunity for further financial gain in London and encouraged by his friend Sir Robert Perks, Yerkes crossed the Atlantic in 1900. By 1901, backed by American money, Yerkes had effectively seized control of the then-ailing District Line. By 1902, now backed by the powerful Speyer banking family as well, he had acquired and amalgamated several planned Tube schemes and was poised to begin construction of the Piccadilly Line. He was also similarly placed to build the Charing Cross, Euston and Hampstead Railway (which would go on to form the basis for one branch of the Northern Line). Finally, by 1903, he had also acquired the begun-but-bankrupt Bakerloo Line.

In three short years, Yerkes had acquired a considerable amount of both London’s existing transport network and the network that would come to be.

An Epic Undertaking

Thus was the situation that September, when Yerkes laid out the scene to Leslie Green. Yerke’s company, the Underground Electric Railways Company London Ltd (UERL) had the plans and they were already being put into production. Tunnels were being cut and land acquired at an incredible pace across all three prospective new lines (the District Line would also be expanded and electrified, but that lies outside the scope of this article). What UERL didn’t have, however, was stations – and that required an architect.

Whether Green realised the sheer scale of the task he was about to undertake is unclear. What is clear, however, is that by the end of September Green had been contracted to be the Architect-in-Charge of all station design across Yerkes’ three new lines (the District would stay in the experienced hands of Harry Ford), for which his practice would be paid the sum of £2000 a year by UERL. The only stations outside his remit would be Finsbury Park (which was being constructed by the Great Northern Railway), Barons Court and Hammersmith (both of which, being District Line stations already, would fall to Ford).

Strictly speaking, Green’s contract indicated that he would only be responsible for buildings “above ground,” but it was still a mammoth task. It also soon became clear that whilst that may have been the letter of the contract, it certainly wasn’t what Yerkes saw as the spirit. Green would soon find himself playing a role in the design of signage and tiling below ground as well.

Fast, Fancy and Fairly Priced

Green also soon discovered that Yerkes was definitely not a “hands-off” employer. Yerkes had very clear ideas as to how he wanted the project taken forward. Foreshadowing the later branding work Frank Pick would carry out on the network, Yerkes insisted on a consistent look and feel across stations on all three of the new lines. He also believed firmly in the superiority of American engineering and construction methods and leaned heavily on Green to make use of both. Yerkes wanted his stations to be bold and distinctive – in his own words, they should be fitted out with decorative elements “fully equal to those of the best stations on the Central London Railway.”

As if the above wasn’t a tricky enough mandate for Green to achieve, Yerkes also stressed that whilst he was prepared to pay for quality where it was required (as would be the case with the brass clocks that would feature heavily throughout Green’s stations, for example), he expected Green to achieve considerable cost savings wherever possible. Finally, time would also be a major limiting factor that Green would have to deal with – construction was already well underway on the new lines, and the station production schedule would be extremely aggressive.

Green swiftly realised that the construction and design methods that had been used for stations on previous Underground lines would fall far short of meeting Yerkes’ goals. After careful consideration (and possibly thanks to prompting from Yerkes himself) Green decided that the stations would use a construction method then common in America, but rarely utilized in the UK. The stations would be two-storey buildings built out of a robust load-bearing steel frame which would then be faced off with brickwork and cladding. This would allow the stations to be constructed relatively quickly and would also maximise the space within the buildings themselves. Importantly, the steel frame would be designed to support further storeys on top of the existing two, allowing Yerkes to sell real-estate over many of the stations Green designed.

It was in his choice of cladding material, however, that Green effectively cemented his legacy. After considerable investigation, he decided that the stations would be faced with ox-blood red “Burmantoft’s Faïence” to be provided by the Leeds Fireclay Company. The faïence was relatively cheap (apparently nine shillings per visual foot), hardy, quick to produce and – importantly for Green – could be just as easily and cheaply moulded into the various decorative touches he planned on including within each individual design.

Green’s choice of material would effectively cement his design legacy. His distinctive ox-blood red stations remain a key fixture on the streets of London and are, for many, the very visual definition of an Underground station. Of the stations Green would design, only five would not carry this faïence – Golders Green (over which there is some debate as to whether it was a Green station at all), Regents Park, Tottenham Court Road and Charing Cross (all of which lacked surface buildings) and the original Holborn station.

In terms of external styling, Green was not content merely to make a statement through his choice of material. Green’s stations may have all, broadly speaking, followed the same format – a series of wide bays at ground level with large arched windows above (behind which generally lurked lift equipment) – but he was determined to give each a sense individuality. A proponent of both the Arts and Crafts movement (which objected to “mass produced” visual stylings) and Art Noveau (courtesy of his time in Paris), Green endeavoured to equip each station with its own subtle selection of architectural features. Subtle tweaks to the cornice, ornate carving on window hoods and arches, the occasional carved UERL logo – all were used by Green to add individuality to the designs. He wasn’t afraid to indulge in more unique quirks either. Chalk Farm, for example, carries a Palladian window. Look carefully at the Cranbourn Street frontage at Leicester Square Station and you’ll notice wickets and a pair of cricket bats – J Wisden took the offices above the station. Knightsbridge – now sadly demolished – carried Art Noveau floral mountings across its whole frontage.

Internally, Green’s design was equally distinctive. At ticket hall level, a mixture of ornate tile and wood prevailed. The floors were generally tiled in a mosaic pattern, whilst the walls would be half-clad with green tiling topped off with a highly decorated tile layer (portraying either Acanthus leaves or Pomegranate). Fixtures and fittings – including the lifts – would be finished in carved wood and ticket hall windows generally carried highly decorative tile mouldings. Overall Green wished to convey a sense of heavy craftsmanship and care with occasional brass finishings (and the ever present clocks) adding a sense of style.

Beneath the surface, it is unclear just how much influence Green ended up having in the design. He certainly wasn’t contracted to design the subsurface layouts, and the distinctive tile patterns to be found on the platform of Green stations are mildly reminiscent of New York suggesting Yerkes may well have been involved. Upon termination of his contract in 1907, however, Green would receive an additional payment of £750 in recognition of services delivered in relation to “underground tiling.” Similarly, in his application for Fellowship of the Royal Institute of British Architects during the same year, Green would describe his work on the Underground as follows:

Early in 1903 I was appointed Architect to the Underground Electric Railway Company of London Limited, which was formed for the construction of the Baker Street & Waterloo, the Great Northern Piccadilly & Brompton, and the Charing Cross, Euston & Hampstead Tube Railways. Since that time I have designed and completed the erection of more than 50 Tube Station Buildings, besides designing and carrying out the decorative works to station tunnels, platforms and passages

Wherever the boundaries of his influence lie, therefore, it is clear that he played some role in the design of his stations beneath the surface as well as above. Indeed although all have their own unique touches (often attributable to whichever tiling firm actually carried out the work), it is just as easy to spot a Green station from the window of a tube train as it is from the street. Each carried stretches of cream tiling broken up by bands of colour. The name of the station would be fired directly into the wall tiles and further bands of colour would bracket signage. Geometric patterns of coloured tiles also abound.

The Work Overwhelms

Despite the success of his design and approach to construction, the hectic and heavy workload inevitably began to take its toll on Green. Although assisted by individual architects for each station, and no doubt taking a hands-off approach wherever possible, each site carried its own unique problems that needed to be overcome – whether it was a slope, the need to split the frontage around existing buildings (as at Aldwych) or the need to effectively rebuild an already half built station from scratch (as at Oxford Circus). By 1905 his health was beginning to suffer as he pushed forward to deliver the stations at the speed required and by 1907, it became clear that his health had deteriorated so much that he simply couldn’t continue any longer. In June, George Gibb – UERL’s MD (Yerkes had himself died in 1905) – informed Green that his contract would be terminated at the end of that year (although he would be retained as a Consultant Architect). In the same month, Green placed his assistant Stanley Heaps in charge of the station work and departed for France in an effort to rebuild his shattered health. A short spell in a sanatorium on the Norfolk coast served as a final effort to subvert the inevitable but it was too late. Green died – reportedly from tuberculosis – on the 31st August 1908.

An Enduring Legacy

In four short years, Green had left a mark on the Underground that few will ever rival. His distinctive red buildings and serious interiors – whether they are loved or not – are simply iconic. Sadly, however, whilst many of Green’s stations still survive, time has not been kind to most and few retain extensive original features (or at least original features in their original settings).

Green’s stations were produced before the birth of the escalator. Holloway Road was fitted with a wonderfully enigmatic double-helix “moving walkway” but it never opened to the public and the first true escalators were installed at Earl’s Court in 1911. This meant that, as lifts failed both mechanically and in terms of capacity, many of Green’s stations had to be extensively refitted inside, sometimes receiving a complete facelift in the process (Archway was redesigned by Holden in this way). In some extreme cases (such as at Knightsbridge) they were moved completely. Other Green stations such as York Road, Down Street, Brompton Road and Aldwych were closed down entirely. Today often only their still-distinctive design betrays the fact that they existed at all. Finally, from 1986 to 1989 the UTS project – which brought the automated ticket system to the Underground – meant that over 240 stations had to be refitted and rearranged in some way. This obviously included all the surviving Green stations, and many original fittings and layouts were inevitably lost.

In recent years, conservation efforts have been more kind to Green’s stations. Mornington Crescent received an extensive and very sympathetic restoration in the nineties, and at platform level the distinctive Green tiling has either been preserved or sympathetically restored. The entirely voluntary work undertaken by Douglas Rose with regards to charting and detailing the tiling of the Underground is both staggering in its complexity and in what it has achieved – preserving and uncovering tiling long thought lost for posterity both on the page and in reality.

Sadly, however, chances to see Green’s work truly as he left it are now few and far between. Holloway Road perhaps remains as the best chance to do so – a small remnant of a remarkable design achievement located in the busy heart of North London.

Despite this, Green’s legacy remains immense. It is perhaps a greater testament that his stations remain so distinctive to this day despite all their changes than it would be had they simply been preserved “as was.” It may, arguably, have cost him his life, but Green’s visual legacy cannot be understated both for the Underground and for London as a whole.

A Fitting Footnote

Indeed perhaps the strangest testament to his work lies not in reality but in fiction. In 1985, when a tube station was required in the iconic London soap opera EastEnders, the fictional station of “Walford East” was created to serve the purpose.

Obviously Walford East needed to be a station that looked exactly how people pictured an Underground station in their minds and, whether consciously or not, the set designers produced a station that is unmistakeably one of Green’s.

Of course Walford East is apparently on the District Line, and thus whilst it would certainly have been one of Yerkes’ stations in real life it would actually have been designed by Ford not Green. I suspect though that Ford wouldn’t have begrudged Green this strange – if somehow fitting – memorial.

This article first appeared on London Reconnections, a site dedicated to news and long-form writing about London Transport