Eye Magazine

In addition to the evident appeal of buses and trains as exemplars of urban machinery, the London Transport Museum provides a substantial resource for the study of posters and graphic communication design. Over the past ten years or so, the museum has successfully extended the scope of its displays and begun to show the systemic relationships between technology and identity across the metropolis. The museum now presents transport as urban geography manifest through system and design. The significance of the museum’s poster collection is thereby transformed, from an adjunct of machinery, to providing a significant system of communication.

On the first floor of the building is a gallery where the museum displays a changing thematic display of posters drawn from the archive holdings at its Depot in Acton. The present exhibition shows a selection of Art Deco posters from the 1920s and 1930s – a period understood as a ‘golden age of poster design’, and coincidentally a period when the scale and reach of London Transport was greatly enhanced through geographical extension and presentational coherence under the guidance of Frank Pick.Art Deco derives from the decorative arts displayed at the Paris exhibition held in 1925. The exhibition proposed a new style for France to re-establish itself as the global leader in fashion sophistication and luxury goods through its traditions of savoir faire.

The French project recast the geometry of the ancients to speak of speed, glamour and excitement ...