Lidl and Waitrose Tube Map

Take every Waitrose store in London and pretend it's a Tube station. Join up all these Waitrose Tube stations with a fictional network. Then do the same, completely separately, with every Lidl store. What do you get?

Lidl and Waitrose Tube Map (full size)

The 'networks' covered by Waitrose and Lidl are starkly different. There are plenty of Waitrose stores in central London, but there is not one Lidl in fare zone 1. The Waitrose network reaches out to London's suburbs in the northwest and southwest, while Lidl largely covers the east. Interchanges between the networks, corresponding to places with both a Waitrose and a Lidl store, are few and far between.

A few little trivia points about the map:

• I didn't have any hard-and-fast policy regarding how much of London and the outer suburbs to include. I included Tubs Hill, Leatherhead and Dorking because they featured (rare) cases of Lidl and Waitrose stores in close proximity. I included Amersham and Chesham because, in spite of their distance from London, they appear on the real Tube map.
• I stuck to the official names for the Waitrose and Lidl stores as far as possible. Lidl stores can often have somewhat misleading names, which means that some of the 'interchanges' are actually quite far apart. In the most extreme cases, I renamed the Lidl stores. Lidl Wimbledon (1.3 km from Waitrose Wimbledon) became Lidl Plough Lane. Lidl Sevenoaks (1.5 km from Waitrose Sevenoaks but 192 m from Waitrose Tubs Hill) became Lidl Tubs Hill.
• The closest of the 'interchanges' on the map is Enfield Town, where Waitrose and Lidl are only 150 metres apart.
• I tried to join up the stations with lines that seemed vaguely sensible given the geographical locations of the stores, but the resulting networks definitely end up looking very strange.
• The colours of the lines are the same as those used in the Waitrose and Lidl logos. At an early stage I considered giving the Lidl lines a thin yellow stripe, but the effect wasn't that great. In particular, the yellow on blue ended up looking from a distance a lot like the Waitrose green, so the lines didn't contrast as well.

Inside Out Tube Map

The Tube map doesn't aim to depict the positions of stations with perfect geographical accuracy, instead focusing on the way the stations are connected. So what if this was taken to the extreme, and the Tube map was drawn inside out?

Inside Out Tube Map (full size)

After making two maps which involved a lot of technical detail (looking at how the Tube map might look in the future, and unearthing proposals for the Tube which never came to fruition), I wanted to make something a lot more lighthearted.

If you're looking for something even weirder, you should definitely check out this map from Francisco Dans, which works on similar principles to the Inside Out map but distorts the geography to an even greater extent.

Since both maps preserve the relative positions of stations along each line and the locations at which the lines connect to each other, they could technically be used to navigate the London Underground the same as the normal map – not that I would recommend it.