I was yet again on the Bakerloo line recently, specifically to go to Piccadilly Circus. It was a mistake in hindsight to go out, aware it could rain at any time, and I sadly had to cut my journey short. Hence this is a blogpost on a map in a train carriage and not an insightful post on science or a large concrete building or a punk album.
This is the map I saw on the Bakerloo line:
Large frames require large maps, and this one skews far more heavily towards the North. If you excuse the tippex-like markings on the map, you'll notice that central London is extremely big and poorly-defined here. When I think of Central, I think of St Paul's, Trafalgar Square, Soho; not Herne Hill, Mudchute, and certainly not Walthamstow, Cockfosters and Stanmore. The entire Victoria line is on the map - try convincing someone living in Brixton they live in Central, they'd laugh at you.
I wouldn't write an entire blogpost on this map, though, if it wasn't for the inclusion of Elstree and Borehamwood on the map. Firstly, it's not a TfL station, rather Thameslink, but that's not the issue - Thameslink is all over the map. Rather, it's that it's not in London. It's not even close to the border, it only has two TfL bus routes which merely pass through, and it's in zone 6 too.
The frustrating thing is that it only does this for north London - east and west are largely blocked out and the south is obscured by the key. In other words, the map is only determined by the size of the frames and not of how useful it would be to a Bakerloo commuter. You could argue the north would be useful to someone living in Harrow, but surely they wouldn't then need to know where Island Gardens is.
I guess I'm only annoyed because it's called a Central London map - whilst it does cover it, it's more a small subset of the map. And this goes to show that Hertfordshire is basically the Strand.
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