Redrawing London tube map to honour women's names

[John Ashworth]

Reni Eddo-Lodge and Emma Watson to redraw London tube map with women's names

Londoners Reni Eddo-Lodge and Emma Watson are spearheading a project to reimagine the city’s iconic tube map, by renaming all 270 stops after the women and non-binary people who have shaped the history of each pocket of the capital... inspired by a similar project in the book Nonstop Metropolis by Rebecca Solnit and geographer Joshua Jelly-Schapiro, which featured a New York City subway map with all the stations renamed after great women. Both Solnit and Schapiro are working with Eddo-Lodge and Watson to help create the City of Women London.

Early suggestions range from Mary Seacole and Mary Wollstonecraft to Amy Winehouse, Zadie Smith, Jung Chang and Virginia Woolf.

“The project aims to identify remarkable female or non-binary Londoners who have had an impact on the city’s history in some way. It will allocate them to each of the stations depicted on the London tube map according to their connections to a local area,” say the organisers. “Some of these people might be household names, others might be unsung heroes or figures from London’s hidden histories. The names might be drawn from arts, civil society, business, politics, sport and so on.”

The organisers hope the map will “further contribute to the way London is imagined, navigated, and lived”, and say that “we will never think of the tube – or public space – the same way again”...