please empty your brain below

I'm sure there are plenty of bus stops named after pubs which are no longer there. TfL appear to be in no rush to rename Bakers Arms in Leyton, despite it now being a bookies. I wonder if they just did it here because the idea of getting the iBus lady to say "Zangwill" tickled them.
The problem with pub names is that once the pub closes, the memory of the location quickly fades, especially with the population turnover, the pub ghost only survives if a major local road junction is named after it, hence Bricklayers Arms and Crooked Billet, although Charlie Brown was named after the owner of a pub and the cafe that he opened opposite.

I doubt if many people now know where Harrow Road - Plough was.
The ascii code for SPACE is much lower than the ascii code for A. So I'd say that Zangwill is definitely last, alphabetically, in London.
Z-space-S-space-L? Really?
Z-space-S-space-L. Really.

Click on 49306 in the post to confirm.
So, in terms of buses per hour or something like that, which is London's most over-worked bus stop. And in terms of buses per day (or even week) which bus stop is least served?
Lexically, a space precedes A (or a letter on its own precedes the same letter followed by A) so Z S L would come first and leave Zangwill Road in its final glory.

However, the London Zoo people actually call themselves ZSL, not Z S L or even Z.S.L. So that - or the zoological for which the Z stands - would put them last. But not in TfL's terms.
I'll accept that 'The Brook' could well have been named after the former pub on the corner. Just as likely, though, it was to mark the stopping point for the former hospital of the same name.
http://www.workhouses.org.uk/MAB-Brook/
You've actually got me wondering, now, as to the origin of the name. I've always assumed it was brook as in stream (Kidbrooke is not far away) but - if there's road named after Israel Zangwill - maybe it could have been called after a person?
Coincidentally, and appropriately for today's post, as I was walking along Old Kent Road last night I noticed that the Trafalgar Avenue bus stop was incorrectly labelled Trafalgar Square! Luckily there were no disappointed tourists evident.... I'll get you a photo on my way past today.
If you look closely at the Google Streetview image, the signwriters seem to have spelt 'ZSL' without (full-width) blanks, so this bus stop might indeed qualify as the last one:

<https://goo.gl/maps/7ZoUmqxsrM52>

And it looks like acronyms in the spreadsheet are generally written with blanks between the letters, like "R A F Northolt" or "U E L Stratford Campus". Maybe they're necessary for screen readers to get the pronunciation right.
Joachim's observations raise the philosophical question of what is the "real" name of a bus stop. Is it the entry in a particular database (but what if there is an error here?), what is painted on the flag(same proviso), what "everybody" calls it, or something else? (Echoes also of Stop E and Stop M).
The real bus stop name is found on the white sticker under the flag - this is what is used to report a maintenance problem for example.
The busiest bus stop may well be the one at the south end of waterloo m bridge, at which all buses crossing the bridge may call cl - although it was always a request stop and many buses miss it
What all this has revealed is a recent change to the bus stop flag. Traditionally it said BUS STOP on a black bar across the roundel, then (in the London Regional Transport era?) text on the bar was frowned upon so it moved below the roundel. Now it seems to be back across the middle but the bar is red. The big improvement though is actually knowing the name of a stop and so being able to get off at the right one in a strange area. Some things really are improved by technology!
Well, it took a year for TfL to rename Brentford Police Station stop to whatever it is now (Half Acre I think). But it took GMPTE/TfGM at least 5 years to rename a bus stop from Oxford Street/Odeon Cinema to Oxford Street/St Peter's Square after the cinema closed...
I want more bus stop posts!
Joachim said:

"it looks like acronyms in the spreadsheet are generally written with blanks between the letters, like "R A F Northolt" or "U E L Stratford Campus". Maybe they're necessary for screen readers to get the pronunciation right."

I suspect the reason *might* be that the vast variation in how different people may choose to type stop names into the system - all-caps, mixed case, all lower-case, even TYpos like THis - mean they have an automated process that turns all the names to Initial Caps Case - which is all very well until it runs up against Zsl London Zoo and Raf Northolt.

So I'd guess that could be why they space these out in the database, to keep them capitalised - although perhaps an additional benefit is keeping the iBus woman's job easier by making it more obvious which abbreviations to spell out and which to read as acronyms!










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