Name calling
What stations are called, define us
Along with the “Name me six Underground stations named after pubs” question* (“One point each!”) which comes up at some point in every weekly UK pub quiz, there’s another common London question which is so often posed, it’s almost a cliché.
“What TfL station shares no letters in common with the word Mackerel?” The standard answer of course is St John’s Wood but you could add Hoxton to that had you been paying attention to the question.
This is a whole subset of London weirdness. Woodford is the only Underground station not to contain any letters from the word ‘Stickleback’.
And this particular subset of London weirdness - there are other equally weird goings on - even has a name: Tubewhacking*.
Knowing that Pimlico is the only London Underground station which does not contain any of the letters in the word ‘Badger’ is a bit niche. Perivale is the only station with none of the letters of St John's Wood, and St John's Wood is the only station with none of the letters of Perivale. I could go on but won’t.
The station names of the capital - especially the Underground ones - are so, so familiar to Londoners. When we play word games with them, they are solvable because we generally know them. We flick through the tube map in our heads and find the ones named after pubs.
Many Londoners who commute by Underground have developed this hard-wired map within them. At the very least the route that they commute, but probably even more. Those coming into London from West Ruislip every day may well be thinking here “Ah, Perivale: Greenford, Perivale, Hanger Lane. And then the two branches merge…”
Where those two Central Line branches merge becomes a whole load of Actons: West Acton preceded the junction coming from Ealing Broadway. Then after, there’s North Acton and East Acton.
We’ve just about covered all the Acton compass directions but for South Acton. But that exists too - now on the London Overground but once also on the District Line. Next station further up this branch of the Overground (at time of writing not yet the Mildmay line) is Acton Central. Acton Central is quite near the Elizabeth Line’s Acton Main Line.
Coming up the rear is Acton Town. I might there have asked the trivia question “How many TfL stations contain the word ‘Acton’?” But deflating the anticipation, I just now listed them. There are seven stations on the TfL network called Acton. That’s not even starting on all the nearby Ealings.
When we live in London, the term we give to our local area is often defined by the nearest station. “Where do you live?” “I live in Queensbury”. The area was not called Queensbury before the tube - it’s a made-up name. It was a random bit of countryside before the railway came and quite near to the existing Kingsbury. It needed a name and became Queensbury.
Similarly we have Oakwood on the far north of the Piccadilly Line. A made-up name but locals might well have referred to themselves as dweller of Enfield West. This was the original name for the station before London Transport quickly changed their mind and named their new station after Oak Lodge, a nearby house.
Such is our devotion to identifying ourselves by station names is that we certainly would have said we lived in Enfield West (had that name prevailed), and not West Enfield. Clapham North is a station name and few say instead that they live in North Clapham which is the normal English language way of indicating a geographical area.
The Oakwoods and Queenburys were new appellations. Certain areas were relocated by their local station name. There was never a place called South Wimbledon and if there was, it would be south of Wimbledon - perhaps in the Dundonald Road tram stop area. There was however a perfectly usable placename of Merton - former home to Horatio Nelson and Emma Hamilton. Plonking South Wimbledon station on Merton High Street caused no end of confusion and the slow death of the Merton placename.
There was a centuries-old village called North End. But the railways wanted a better name and so sited West Kensington station there. North End is no longer a thing and West Kensington is now in use. It’s not in Kensington and certainly not west of it.
Why is Brondesbury Overground station in Kilburn? It is east of the real Brondesbury.
A number of station names have really bugged me over the years because they are just wrong, wrong, wrong. My least favourite is Acton Town, mentioned already. It was never in Acton at all. It’s in the centre of what had been called Gunnersbury.
At least it was called ‘Mill Hill Park’ to begin with which was the name of a nearby house and slightly sensible. But then somebody in a stroke of madness decided it was to be instead ‘Acton Town’, implying it is in the centre of Acton. It ain’t.
Meanwhile, Gunnersbury station is not in Gunnersbury. It’s in Chiswick. Everything nearby is Chiswick. It’s on Chiswick High Road. It’s not Gunnersbury. Or rather now it is, because the station is called that and so locals say that they are Gunnersburians.
A graphic designer called Mike Hall is a bit of a hero of mine as he produced a novel tube map idea in 2015 - I love novel tube map ideas - and he went about renaming some stations too.
On his new map, the 'tick' marks for stations were replaced by circles in a Paris Metro styley. Blue and white circles represented accessibility rather than wheelchair symbols on the traditional map.
Rounded rectangles were in place of circles for interchanges. He thought that on the official TfL map, certain interchanges appeared over-complicated.
On the map section above, Mike Hall renamed Acton Town as Gunnersbury Park (yes!) and Gunnersbury became Chiswick High Road.
On the following excerpt above, University College appears south of Euston instead of Euston Square, and Edgware Road on the Bakerloo line became Paddington Green. These were renamed in order to make them more relevant to their location, avoiding confusion with other nearby stations.
On this particular excerpt he’s introduced two new colours (Purple for Metropolitan fast service to Amersham/Chesham/Watford; Gold for the Northern Line Charing Cross branch).
Elsewhere on the map, Brondesbury was renamed 'Kilburn Grange’. Latimer Road was renamed ‘North Kensington’ - there is no longer a road in the area by that name.
The issue of two further stations sharing the same name - Bethnal Green - was addressed by renaming the Central Line station as 'Bethnal Green Gardens' while the other station on the Overground retained its original name.
Abbey Road DLR station was renamed 'Abbey Mills', in reference to the nearby pumping station and to avoid confusion with the more famous Abbey Road in St John's Wood.
The shape of the River Thames was redrawn to better reflect reality. Wapping and Rotherhithe stations were repositioned to reflect their proximity to the river.
The River Lea was added as a distinguishable physical feature in addition to the Thames - intended to alleviate the difficulty in distinguishing geographical locations in an area of London with many confusingly intersecting lines.
I’m not in a ‘Bakerloo Line southern extension’ way trying to reinvent London. This is just a thought to be a bit more accurate with a few station names since we all use them. It would also be nice to revive some older names - I’m looking at you, New Cross with your nearby confusing New Cross Gate. There’s a perfectly good older ‘Hatcham’ waiting in the wings for some time back in the sun..
NOTES
Spoiler alert: Angel, Elephant & Castle, Manor House, Maida Vale, Royal Oak and Swiss Cottage. Manor House is the really tricky one. But actually there are seven - and maybe even more than seven. The seventh is Maida Vale. It’s only indirectly named after a pub. The whole suburb was named after the ‘Hero of Maida’ public house and the station named after the suburb.
Tubewhacking: This is a real thing and you can play it yourself: www.reload.me.uk/tubewhack/
Going too far: Mike Hall went even more Parisian, abandoning the present names for the London Underground lines and recategorising them numerically. The numerical order was based on the sequence of dates that the lines were opened or created, from Line 1 (Circle Line, a section of which was opened between Paddington and Farringdon stations in 1863) to Line 14 (Waterloo & City Line, which was incorporated into the Underground system in 1992).
À propos to nothing: I could have shoehorned the video of my walk between Wimbledon Park to Southfields into this article. I’m walking between every London Underground station to raise money for Prostate Cancer UK. Had I decided to justify the inclusion of the video I’d have mentioned that Southfields station (District Line) was originally built in the middle of nowhere and so needed a name. So they took the name of the field underneath - South Field - and added an s. Northfields station on the Piccadilly Line has a similar original and also used the ‘add an s to a field name’ concept. Darn it, let’s add the video anyway. It was a sunny August day in SW19…
In the same way, Clapham Junction is in Battersea, not Clapham, but was so christened because at the time Battersea was regarded as déclassé compared to Clapham. (Not necessarily true now.)
Good stuff. I’ve occasionally set the quiz question “What is the only tube station to contain none of the letters of Londonist?”. I won’t reveal the answer in case anyone wants to work it out (or use that tool to search it).