55 Facts About Frank Pick

Frank Pick was chief executive officer and vice-chairman of the London Passenger Transport Board from its creation in 1933 until 1940.

Frank Pick steered the development of the London Underground's corporate identity by commissioning eye-catching commercial art, graphic design and modern architecture, establishing a highly recognisable brand, including the first versions of the roundel and typeface still used today.

Frank Pick was a founding member and later served as president of the Design and Industries Association.

Frank Pick was the first chairman of the Council for Art and Industry and regularly wrote and lectured on design and urban planning subjects.

Frank Pick was born on 23 November 1878 at Spalding, Lincolnshire.

Frank Pick's paternal grandfather, Charles Frank Pick, was a farmer in Spalding who died in his forties, leaving eight children.

Frank Pick's maternal grandfather, Thomas Clarke, was a blacksmith and Wesleyan lay preacher.

Frank Pick attended St Peter's School in York on a scholarship, and was articled to a York solicitor, George Crombie, in March 1897.

In 1902, Frank Pick began working for the North Eastern Railway.

Frank Pick worked first in the company's traffic statistics department before becoming assistant to the company's general manager, Sir George Gibb in 1904.

At Gibb's invitation, Frank Pick moved to the UERL to continue working as his assistant.

Frank Pick became traffic development officer in 1909 and commercial manager in 1912.

One of Frank Pick's responsibilities was to increase passenger numbers, and he believed that the best way to do so was by encouraging increased patronage of the company's services outside peak hours.

Frank Pick commissioned posters which promoted the Underground's trains and London General Omnibus Company's buses as a means of reaching the countryside around London and attractions within the city.

Frank Pick introduced a common advertising policy, improving the appearance of stations by standardising poster sizes, limiting the number used and controlling their positioning.

Frank Pick specified to Johnston in 1913 that he wanted a typeface that would ensure that the Underground Group's posters would not be mistaken for advertisements; it should have "the bold simplicity of the authentic lettering of the finest periods" and belong "unmistakably to the twentieth century".

In conjunction with his changes to poster display arrangements, Frank Pick experimented with the positioning and sizing of station name signs on platforms, which were often inadequate in number or poorly placed.

In 1909, Frank Pick started to combine the "bulls-eye" and the "UNDERGROUND" brand on posters and station buildings, but was not satisfied with the arrangement.

Frank Pick commissioned Johnston to redesign the "bulls-eye" and the form used today is based on that developed by Johnston and first used in 1919.

In 1919, with a return to normality after the First World War, Frank Pick began developing plans to extend the Underground network out into suburbs that lacked adequate transport services.

For new lines, Frank Pick first considered extending Underground services to the northeast of London where the mainline suburban services of the Great Northern Railway and Great Eastern Railway were poor and unreliable.

Frank Pick still faced strong opposition from the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway and the London and South Western Railway which operated in the area, but the Underground had the advantage of already having an approval for the last few miles of the route as part of an unused prewar permission for a new line from Wimbledon to Sutton.

Frank Pick presented plans to relieve the congestion at Finsbury Park by extending the Piccadilly tube north to Southgate.

The designs replaced a set by the Underground's own architect, Stanley Heaps, which Frank Pick had found unsatisfactory.

Frank Pick had first met Holden at the Design and Industries Association in 1915, and he saw the modernist architect as one he could work with to define what Frank Pick called "a new architectural idiom".

Frank Pick wanted to streamline and simplify the design of the stations to make them welcoming, brightly lit and efficient with large, uncluttered ticket halls for the rapid sale of tickets and quick access to the trains via escalators.

Frank Pick wanted a new type of building for the more open sites of the stations on the Piccadilly line's extensions.

Frank Pick was disappointed with much of the new architecture that he saw in Germany and Sweden, considering it either too extreme or unsatisfactorily experimental.

The designs Frank Pick commissioned from Holden established a new standard for the Underground, with the prototype station at Sudbury Town being described by architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner as a "landmark" and the start of "the 'classic' phase of Underground architecture".

Frank Pick oversaw the designs of the new bus stops and bus shelters that were installed when specified stopping points were introduced for bus services.

Albert Stanley and Frank Pick fought back by calling on parliament to regulate bus operations in the capital.

Frank Pick led the board's negotiations on the compensation to be paid to the owners and shareholders of each of the transport operations being taken over.

Frank Pick had previously suggested a reorganisation of the LPTB's senior management structure and hoped to be able to continue with the organisation in some sort of joint general manager position.

Frank Pick began to set out his ideas on reconstruction and town planning, an area of design he became interested in through its connection to transport planning.

Frank Pick wrote and lectured extensively on this subject during the 1920s and 1930s including presenting a 14,000-word paper to the Institute of Transport in 1927 and addressing the International Housing and Town Planning Congress in 1939.

Concerned about the uncontrolled and unchecked growth of London, partly facilitated by the new lines that London Underground was building, Frank Pick was a strong supporter of the need for a green belt around the capital to maintain open space within reach of urban areas.

Frank Pick, This is the World that Man Made, or The New Creation, 1922.

Frank Pick returned to the subject in lectures he gave in the 1930s when he outlined his concern that at some not too distant point progress in civilisation would come to a natural end and a stable condition would arise where, he believed, it would be hard to maintain creativity and an entropic decline would follow.

Frank Pick wrote the introduction to the English translation of Walter Gropius's The New Architecture and the Bauhaus published in 1935.

Beside his positions at the UERL and LPTB, Frank Pick held a number of industrial administrative and advisory positions.

In 1917, during the First World War, Frank Pick was appointed to be head of the Mines Directorate's Household Fuel and Lighting Department at the Board of Trade where Albert Stanley was the President.

Frank Pick was responsible for the control of the rationing and distribution of domestic fuel supplies.

Also in 1917, Frank Pick was appointed as a member of the Special Committee advising the Civil Aerial Transport Committee on technical and practical questions of aerial transport.

Frank Pick served as a member of the London and Home Counties Traffic Advisory Committee and as a member of the Crown Lands Advisory Committee.

Frank Pick was President of the Design and Industries Association from 1932 to 1934 and the chairman of the Board of Trade's Council for Art and Industry from 1934 to 1939.

Biographers have characterised Frank Pick as being "very shy", and "brilliant but lonely".

Frank Pick ran his office on a fortnightly cycle and his workload was prodigious.

Out of these exploratory methods there often emerged new and most interesting solutions, which Frank Pick was quick to appreciate, and to adopt in substitution for his own proposals.

Frank Pick did accept, in 1932, the Soviet Union's Honorary Badge of Merit for his advice on the construction of the Moscow Metro.

Frank Pick was an honorary member of the Royal Institute of British Architects.

Frank Pick was widely read and was influenced by many writers on scientific, sociological and social matters including works by Alfred North Whitehead, Leonard Hobhouse, Edwin Lankester, Arthur Eddington and John Ruskin.

Frank Pick died at his home, 15 Wildwood Road, Hampstead Garden Suburb, on 7 November 1941 from a cerebral haemorrhage.

Frank Pick's funeral was held at Golders Green Crematorium on 11 November 1941 and a memorial service was held at St Peter's Church, Eaton Square on 13 November 1941.

Urban planner Sir Peter Hall suggested that Frank Pick "had as much influence on London's development in the twentieth century as Haussmann had on that of Paris in the nineteenth", and historian Anthony Sutcliffe compared him to Robert Moses, the city planner responsible for many urban infrastructure projects in New York.

Frank Pick is commemorated with a memorial plaque at St Peter's School, York, unveiled in 1953 by Lord Latham, and a blue plaque was erected at his Golders Green home in 1981.