Next stop, Steve Bull! Wolves' history told in London tube map

Mike Cochrane has designed a special Tube-style map highlighting the illustrious history of the club through the ages.

The map goes through the history of Wolves a decade at a time – with past players and managers replacing the likes of Warren Street and Tottenham Court Road.

Aston Villa and West Brom versions of the maps are on their way too according to Mr Cochrane, who has been depicting clubs on the Tube map for more than three years.

The 50-year-old, from Cardiff, said: “I started with the different teams and started doing more and more stuff. The Wolves were good in the 50s so I’ve got all the floodlit friendlies and development of Molineux in there.

"You can see the appearances and goals and I put the promotions on too. I put some stuff about the ground, when they first played at Molineux and any former grounds before that.

“One of the hardest things is to get them in the right order and when they join in the middle there has to be some kind of link, which can be difficult.

"The idea is that you start at the top left – it's not a copy of the Tube map but I call it reimagined – each line is a decade, you start at the top left, it moves to the right and through the decades.

“In the middle of the map there’s all the icons like Billy Wright, Steve Bull and so on.”

It takes Mr Cochrane, who now lives in Warrington, six weeks at a time to do each club’s map.

He begins with doing extensive research into the history before drawing a rough draft and starting to properly design the final copy.

The iconic old gold and black colours were behind his reasoning of choosing to design a Wolves map.

"The thing I like about the Wolves one is the history of it, some teams like Wolves, Derby and Forest have major histories," Mr Cochrane added.

"Wolves won the FA Cup early on and were good in the 50s so there's good.

"You learn new things, too – I didn't know Wolves played a few games at The Hawthorns.

"There was crowd trouble at Molineux so the FA banned them from playing there. The idea of this is to come away from some of the commercialisation of the game.

"Now shirts change every season and going to football is a giant rip off but this is something you can put up whether you're 20 or 70."

As well as football, Mr Cochrane has designed a Tube map for the England rugby team and first got into map drawing by creating them for various towns and villages.

The standard A3 print of Wolves costs £24 but a limited edition, signed and numbered version can be bought for £75.

For more information or to purchase a tube map go to tubeart.co.uk and search Wolves.