London on a Poster: The Golden Age of British Travel Design
There is a version of London that exists entirely in the imagination — a city of red telephone boxes and double-decker buses, of Big Ben rising above the Thames, of the Union Jack snapping in a grey sky above the Houses of Parliament. This London is not quite the city that Londoners live in, but it is the city that the world recognises, and it was largely invented between the 1920s and the 1960s by a generation of British graphic artists working in the tradition of the travel poster.
The Poster as Art Form
The travel poster emerged in the late nineteenth century as a commercial genre — a way of selling railway journeys, seaside holidays, and foreign destinations to a newly mobile public. In Britain, the genre reached its artistic peak in the interwar years, when the major transport organisations — the London Underground, the London Midland and Scottish Railway, the Great Western Railway — began commissioning work from serious artists rather than commercial illustrators.
The results were extraordinary. Artists like Edward McKnight Kauffer, an American who had settled in London and absorbed the lessons of Cubism and Vorticism, brought a modernist sensibility to the commercial brief. Frank Pick, the visionary design director of London Underground, understood that the poster was not merely an advertisement but a form of public art — that the walls of the Underground could be a gallery, and that the daily commuter deserved beauty as much as information.
The Artists of the Golden Age
Tom Eckersley (1914–2000) was perhaps the most purely gifted graphic designer of his generation. Born in Lancashire, he studied at Salford School of Art and moved to London in 1934, where he began a partnership with Eric Lombers that produced some of the most elegant posters of the pre-war period. After the war, working alone, Eckersley developed a style of extraordinary economy — bold flat colour, simple geometric forms, and a wit that never tipped into whimsy. His posters for London Transport, the GPO, and the BBC are among the finest examples of mid-century graphic design anywhere in the world.
Abram Games (1914–1996) brought a different sensibility — more complex, more symbolic, more willing to use visual metaphor and optical illusion. Games, who served as Official War Poster Artist during the Second World War, described his method as “maximum meaning, minimum means” — a phrase that captures the essential ambition of the British poster tradition at its best. His post-war work for London Transport and other clients demonstrated that the commercial poster could carry genuine intellectual content without sacrificing immediate visual impact.
The Icons
The visual vocabulary of London that these artists helped to establish was built around a small number of objects that had, by the mid-twentieth century, become genuinely iconic — in the original sense of the word: images that stood for something larger than themselves.
The Elizabeth Tower — universally known as Big Ben, though that name properly belongs to the great bell inside — was completed in 1859 to the designs of Augustus Pugin, working within Charles Barry’s Gothic Revival framework for the new Palace of Westminster. Its silhouette, with the distinctive clock faces and the pointed spire, became the shorthand for London itself — the image that appeared on postcards, in films, and on posters whenever the city needed to be identified in a single image.
The red telephone box — specifically the K6 model, designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott in 1935 to mark the Silver Jubilee of King George V — is one of the most successful pieces of public design in British history. Scott, who also designed Battersea Power Station and Liverpool Cathedral, brought to the telephone box the same monumental confidence he brought to his larger works. The K6’s distinctive domed roof, its Georgian proportions, and its particular shade of red — officially “post office red” — made it immediately recognisable and immediately beloved.
The double-decker bus — and specifically the Routemaster, introduced in 1956 and designed by Douglas Scott and Colin Curtis — completed the trinity of London’s most recognisable street furniture. Like the telephone box, the Routemaster was a piece of design that transcended its function: it was not merely a vehicle but a symbol, and its retirement from regular service in 2005 was mourned as a cultural loss as much as a practical inconvenience.
The Legacy
The golden age of the British travel poster ended, roughly, with the 1960s — killed by the rise of television advertising, the decline of the railway as the primary mode of long-distance travel, and the broader cultural shift away from the graphic traditions of the interwar and immediate post-war years. But the images it produced have never lost their power. The bold colour, the confident line, the reduction of a complex city to its essential symbols — these qualities speak to something permanent in the way we understand and remember places.
The London of the vintage travel poster is not a documentary record. It is something more interesting: a distillation, a myth, a set of images so perfectly chosen and so beautifully rendered that they have become more real, in some sense, than the city itself. When we think of London, we think in these colours and these forms — and we have a generation of British graphic artists to thank for it.
References: Hewitt, J. The Poster. London: Reaktion Books, 2018. — Hollis, R. Graphic Design: A Concise History. London: Thames & Hudson, 2001. — Riddell, F. Eckersley: Graphic Designer. London: Lund Humphries, 2014.
The visual language of the vintage London travel poster — Big Ben, the red telephone box, the double-decker bus, the Union Jack — is celebrated on the covers of the London Icons Journal, a hardcover journal with 150 lined pages.
