Would you rename this station?

A London Assembly Member is calling for one of the Edgware Road Tube stations to be renamed to something more intuitive. There are two stations called Edgware Road on the London Underground, one on the Bakerloo line which Murad Queshi believes should be called, "Church Street Market" and another on the Circle, District and Hammersmith & City Line.


Both stations have entrances on Edgware Road but they are about 150 metres apart and separated by a flyover and dual carriage way, so it is a bit galling if you meet someone at the wrong Edgware Road.

Mr Qureshi said: "Whenever you invite friends and family over via the Tube and you tell them Edgware Road, you always end up going to the wrong one to pick them up because they're at the other." The simple answer is to tell them which Edgware Road you mean and I don't think that Qureshi is going to have a lot of luck with this particular campaign.

He's right in saying that there are "lots of anomalies like this", but if the station names were changed to give a more helpful description to where they literally are that would mean changing, well, err, quite a lot of them. Gunnersbury would be renamed to "Chiswick High Road near that horrible carpark".

TfL apparently get several requests a year to change station names, but very rarely agree to them. The last change was made in 1989 when Surrey Docks on the East London line was renamed Surrey Quays. There's an ongoing campaign for Arsenal to revert back to its old name of Gillespie Road (so far about 4,000 people have signed an online petition).

Fortunately there's is going to be some renaming in Shepherd's Bush which also has two Tube stations currently with the same name. The station on the Hammersmith & City Line will be renamed Shepherd's Bush Market in 2008. This makes a lot of sense as it's a good five minutes walk away from the Shepherd's Bush station on the Central Line.

With so few changes it looks like Mr Qureshi will have a long wait. Many thanks to regular commenter John F for giving me the heads up on this.

London Underground; Tube Posted by annie mole Monday, September 17, 2007 Permalink COMMENT HERE
Tweet http://london-underground.blogspot.com/2007/09/would-you-rename-this-station.html