Designing a new Tube-inspired collection

You may not be familiar with our names, but we are sure you’ll recognise our iconic moquette designs produced for Transport for London and stocked in the London Transport Museum shop. We entered and won an open competition in 2010 to create a new moquette for the London Underground. Today you can see our designs on five Tube lines, as well as the Overground, Trams, and the new Elizabeth line.  

As a design studio, we have worked with TfL on numerous moquette designs over the last thirteen years, but our main Wallace Sewell retail collections are predominantly woven scarves, throws and cushions.

We designed an exclusive limited collection with London Transport Museum for the 150th anniversary of the Underground in 2013. The range was incredibly popular, so a decade on, we revisited that design and updated it for 2023.

It still includes all the colours of the Underground lines, intersected with the Overground line, but has the addition of the Tram and DLR lines, and the all-important new Elizabeth line. They now traverse across a sophisticated steel grey background, and the design has been condensed so the scarf carries the full pattern. 

Our design process unites traditional techniques with technology and modern industrial production: we usually begin with sketches or yarn windings, but because we already had the basis of the 150th design to work with, this time we started on computers and designed digitally. From there, we used the handlooms in our studios to create swatches to explore woven structures and the interplay of the colours of the warp and weft (the horizontal and vertical yarns of a loom). 

We are proud to have always designed and manufactured in the UK, and we have worked with a historic fourth generation family-run mill in Lancashire for over 22 years. Using state-of-the-art power looms, they are able to translate our designs from the handlooms and manufacture rolls of cloth at scale. Once the fabric is woven, it is washed to create a super soft and luxurious finish. Then back at the mill, our team hand-cut each product, quality check for imperfections, label and package them ready to be dispatched to our customers ─ in this case, the London Transport Museum shop! 

The Museum’s exclusive Tube 160 Wallace Sewell Collection features a classic tasseled scarf, woven in soft merino lambswool, alongside a practical tote bag, a zipped purse, and a cross-body bag. We are honoured to be a part of the history of TfL and London Transport Museum. We hope that we have interpreted the iconic Tube map, originally designed by Harry Beck in 1933, in a modern, yet timeless way: instantly recognisable, yet subtle enough to be worn by anyone.

Congratulations and happy 160th birthday to the London Underground!

Did you know that of the 15 routes represented in the scarf and cloth, over half currently sport moquette designs by Wallace Sewell on their seating?

Shop the Tube 160 Wallace Sewell range