Oxford-born Peter Roberson was awarded a scholarship to the Oxford School of Art at the age of fourteen. Unhappy with the emphasis placed by his teachers upon drawing from the antique, he decided to specialize in lettering and illumination and this led, at the end of three years, to employment by the Clarendon Press. Working first as a cartographical draughtsman, he turned to design bindings and dustjackets and to illustrate some of their learned books. In 1935, after eleven years with Clarendon, he moved to London to work for the advertising company of C Vernon & Sons. His many tasks, including copy writing and the design of posters, leaflets and display panels, demanded a less traditional, more innovative approach to his material and helped him to develop in ways particularly useful to his post-war projects.
During the Second World War, Roberson served in the mapping division of the Royal Engineers, where he used his skills to draw maps of the continental coastlines from photographs taken by members of the RAF.
Soon after the end of the war, he moved from Vernons to the smaller advertising agency of Samuel Cooper, but then left to work as a freelance artist. It was in this capacity, at the end of the forties, that he began his best-known work as a designer for London Transport. Over a period of thirty years, he produced more than thirty posters, a number of illustrated books (such as Theatregoer's London and Country Walks) and many signs. Additionally, London Transport retained him as Typographical Assistant, a position which involved the design of a mass of ephemeral matter, such as timetables, staff notices, invitations and greetings cards. While he remained constantly occupied with commissions for such products as stamps and illustrated books, he also painted independent watercolours of landscapes in Britain, Europe and North Africa. Never retiring officially, he ceased to work only in 1988, when rheumatism affected his right hand. He died three years later on 30 January 1991.
Roberson was essentially a craftsman, willing to turn his skills as a draughtsman, watercolourist and printmaker to the solving of any design problem. As a result, his work is varied in style and medium, and almost always eminently suitable to each subject and purpose. The coloured lithograph of a London Pond is a perfect advertisement for London Transport's ability to offer access to unspoilt waterscapes for, through its blue-greens and ambiguous spaces, it offers a cool, inviting experience quite other than that of a stark but confining underground station. Elsewhere, in designs based around the Coronation and the Lord Mayor's Procession, bright bodycolour gives the keynote of festivity. The most restrained palette of black ink - applied with pen and brush - focusses attention upon human character in action, be it violent and adventurous, as in Treasure Island, threatening yet humorous, as in Mods and Rockers, or, as in Hyde Park, erotically suggestive.
