Tubular bells and whistles

We're currently looking around for some artwork to jolly up our rather minimalist office walls. All information designers are obsessed by Beck's London tube map – it's practically an interview question: 'how much do you love Beck's tube map?' – and so we've been looking around for alternatives to the ubiquitous Great Bear poster.

While hunting around for tube maps, it's clear that Beck's creation now has its own ever-expanding subculture. I remember looking at Animals on the Underground (where people identify animal shapes from the tube map) a long time ago and there was little there. Now there's rhinos, puppies and seals galore.

This is potentially a more useful variation, if less fun: someone has identified all the tube connections where it's quicker to walk between stations than take the tube, and created a map with walklines. As the guy himself says, it's a little cluttered but a handy reference (similar to this famous book, The Way Out Tube Map, which tells you where to stand on the train to make the quickest possible exit).

The idea of the map as an evolving work of art is so widely recognised that you can even do a quiz to find out which version of the map you are. I'm a Beck classic, which I'm very pleased about.

Here's a lovely idea, which has apparently taken off around the world: this site, Living in a tube map, encourages you to take photos around your local tube station and upload them, where they can be accessed via an interactive map. It means that if you've always wondered what Pimlico looks like, or whether you can see the stadium from Wembley Central, you can take a look.

Once you've started investigating this subculture, it's strangely addictive. I'm blaming hundreds of students, all of whom have had the same bright idea for an assignment. Here's Shakespeare as a tube map, for instance, which I'm sure started off as an undergraduate piece. And this map shows you which tube stations have bloggers nearby – again I'm sure someone had too much time on their hands.

Finally, another nice idea. This map morphs depending on which station you click on to show you how long it takes to get to all the other stations on the map. Have a play: it's a bit like teasing a sea anemone.

Want more? This guy's blog has a much better list than this, including a map that shows where all the toilets are. But beware if you're tempted to keep searching for more: like the underground itself, it's sometimes hard to know where to get off...