Maps of the mind

MacDonald ‘Max’ Gill (1884–1947) is less well known than his notorious brother, Eric. But was he less of a designer, less of an artist?

The son of a Brighton clergyman, his career was built on a sequence of remarkable connections. The architect Halsey Ricardo, a descendant of the economist, was his tutor. While working for church builders Nicholson and Corlette, Gill very likely met Edwin Lutyens at the Art Workers’ Guild.

And for Nashdom, the neo-Georgian house Lutyens built in 1909 for Prince Dolgorouki at Burnham in Buckinghamshire, Gill drew an imaginative ‘Wind Map’. Somewhere between illustration and cartography, this was a pointer of what was soon to come from his pen and brush.

In 1913 Frank Pick, the publicity manager of the Underground Electric Railway Company of London, commissioned Gill to cheer up the Tube, then depressed by competition from the new motor buses. The result was Gill’s 1914 ‘Wonderground’, a fully mature realisation of the hybrid caricature maps he made his own. Displayed at every Tube station, it was the beginning of Pick’s consciousness-raising campaign, which positioned the future London Transport as a benign patron of the arts and an agent of good citizenship. ‘It makes the hoardings more popular than the trains,’ the Daily Sketch enthused.

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(Pick would later become known as one of the great champions of modern design, a pioneer of what we now call ‘corporate identity’. His creation of London Transport bears comparison with Haussmann in Paris and Robert Moses in New York, although more imaginative than the former and more principled than the latter.)

‘Wonderground’ is seasoned whimsy. It is a late expression of merrie Imperial pleasantness, but it is also exceptional draughtsmanship: a synoptic marvel. Like Giambattista Nolli, whose Rome map of 1748 is the gold standard of imagined aerial views, Gill had perhaps never been in an aeroplane.