please empty your brain below

I had thought that the placenames were just picked by wherever the sign's designer thought the sign was placed - but having read the Naming Strategy, I'm more inclined to go with your theory that it's perhaps been a committee of some sort.

(You may also enjoy reading the TfL Street map design standard (31MB PDF))

Having recently started cycling to work (my own bike), I'd been a little surprised to find Clerkenwell extended so far north, but I'm beginning to think it may be a Legible London quirk...

I guess the real difficulty is in defining parts of the City - which I imagine to most people, Barbican aside, is just "the City". You could always go with City ward names but "Farringdon Without" might just get more confusing...

The Clerkenwell definition seems kind of right to me - especially since so much of that area keeps getting called "Farringdon", just because there's a station called that.

The one thing that did strike me as odd was "Angel" - it's Islington. But there's even TfL signs up referring to street works in "Angel town centre" - what?

At least names like NoHo or Midtown don't appear on them.



Oh - and it could be so much worse; they could be just borough names on them. "New Inn Yard - Hackney; Wapping High Street - Tower Hamlets". At least the signs make people think about where they are.

If Legible London don't do it, it will be back to the Estate Agents to decide what gets called what. Usually by stretching a boundary or two to spread the more desirable bits as thinly as possible...

The English are past masters at defining arbitrary boundaries without a thought for the implications. Many of the trouble spots in the world are the result of their handiwork. Beware!

Another source of London localities definitions is now Twitter! If you look at the little maps generated by geo-located tweets they identify not the borough, but the locality within it. An example (click on "Upton Park, London" to get the map):

http://twitter.com/AMonkster/status/21049778793

Now, where is this definition of Upton Park coming from? Is it perhaps coming from the same source as Legible London, or is it another scheme?

Aha, the same strategy that's introduced dozens of totally fictitious placenames on what passes for London bus blinds.

Just like language, placenames change, and it's not just in London. My aunt used to live in a part of Amsterdam called De Pijp (the chimney) from the old chimney of the Heineken factory. The district couldn't have been called that before the chimney was built in the mid-nineteenth century, yet it's still called that today even though the chimney was demolished in the 60s.

I don't think 'Waterloo' as an area name derives entirely from the station. The bridge is considerably older than the station, and was always called that; and I believe the adjoining church (founded 1824) was from the start called 'St John's Waterloo'.

(Yes, 'Angel' as an area name sounds odd to me, but of course 'Elephant and Castle' made a similar jump some time ago.)











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