Introduction
The Names We Pass Through
What does this site explore?
In brief: It traces the origins of names on and around London’s transport map, then follows how those names survived in stations, streets and districts.
At first the names are only warnings.
Blackfriars. Temple. Bank. Monument.
They flare against the dark beyond the carriage window and are gone. A passenger looks up, calculates badly, gathers coat and bag too late. The doors close. The station retreats into the tunnel, taking with it the appointment, the dinner, the connection that might have been made.
This is how London teaches attention: by punishing its absence.
For years I listened only for the name I needed. The rest were pieces of railway furniture, as ordinary as tiled walls or the recorded apology that arrives after a delay and improves nothing. A name meant leave here, change here, remain seated. It did not mean friars in black mantles, a queen’s funeral, a buried river, a vanished palace, a field where cattle stood before the houses came.
Then one day the train stopped between stations.
Nothing happened. That is to say, nothing visible happened. The lights remained on. The passengers performed the small rituals of confinement: sighing, checking watches, staring at telephones that could not hasten the train. The driver spoke, though not to much effect. We would be moving shortly.
It is when one is told to wait that the mind begins to wander.
Blackfriars, I thought. Who were they? Did they live where the station stands? Why black? Why friars? Had the name belonged first to a church, a bridge, a district, or to the railway itself?
Once the question had entered, others followed.
What temple lies behind Temple? Why is there a Monument but no Fire? Which angel gave his name to Angel? Was Shepherd’s Bush once a place of sheep, or is that one of those stories London tells because the truth has become inconvenient?
The map altered before the train moved.
It ceased to be merely a diagram of coloured lines and became what it had always been: an archive disguised as a convenience. The names were not labels pasted onto London. They were openings cut through its surface. Through them came Roman roads, Saxon farms, medieval orders, royal estates, taverns, tollgates, theatres, prisons, speculative builders and villages that believed themselves safely beyond the city until the city arrived.
The Underground did not create most of these names. It collected them.
The railway companies took what already existed above ground: the road, the parish, the bridge, the manor, the public house, the landowner’s name. Then, by fixing these words to platforms and printing them on millions of maps, they granted them a second life. Buildings could be demolished. Rivers could be covered. Religious houses could be dissolved and their stones sold. But the name, repeated daily by clerks, children, tourists and tired commuters, became difficult to kill.
A place may forget what it once was. A railway announcement remembers for it.
This book follows those survivals.
It is not arranged alphabetically. London did not happen alphabetically.
It is not arranged by line, because the lines belong to companies, engineers and parliamentary bargains, whereas the names belong to older things. Nor is it arranged by the dates on which the stations opened. That would tell the story of transport, and this is not chiefly a book about transport.
It is a history of London told through the words by which Londoners travel.
The chapters therefore follow the age of the name, or the event that made the name meaningful. A station opened in the twentieth century may appear near the beginning because its name is ancient. A station on one of the earliest Underground routes may arrive much later because its identity belongs to a newer London.
Blackfriars entered the railway system in 1870. Its true beginning lies in 1276, when Dominican friars moved to a riverside precinct near Ludgate. Charing Cross became a railway terminus in 1864, but the road towards its name begins with a dead queen in 1290.
The rails are Victorian. The words are medieval.
There is danger in a book of origins. A neat story tempts the writer to make it neater. A legend repeated often enough begins to resemble evidence. London is rich in such improvements. Charing, people say, comes from chère reine, dear queen. Elephant and Castle conceals the Infanta of Castile. These explanations are charming, memorable and generally wrong.
The truth is seldom less interesting. It is only less obedient.
Where the record is clear, I will say so. Where historians disagree, the disagreement will remain. Where a date is approximate, it will not be sharpened merely because certainty looks better in print. History has suffered enough from writers who polish doubt until it shines like fact.
Each chapter begins before the railway. It follows the name through the people, buildings and accidents that formed it. Only afterwards does the station arrive, carrying the old word into a new age. Then we return to the present and climb the stairs.
At one point in each chapter, the view narrows. A queen crosses a courtroom. A messenger enters a London dining room. A widow waits on a platform for a dead man’s voice. These moments are not ornaments placed upon the history; they are where the history can be felt at human scale. A city is too large to hold in the mind all at once. One gesture, one object or one brief decision may provide the handle.
We must climb them. The Underground encourages the belief that London consists of separated points: one enters at a coloured circle and emerges at another, while the city between is removed. History restores the missing ground. It asks us to turn into the side street, examine the wall, notice the curve of a lane. Sometimes a whole church remains. Sometimes the evidence is a name and nothing more.
Even the names speak to one another. The heart of the queen remembered at Charing Cross was buried at Blackfriars. Two stations that appear as separate stops preserve different parts of the same funeral.
I call myself the Weary Traveller because this is not the account of an explorer striding tirelessly through the capital. It is the record of someone who grew tired enough to stop.
Weariness has uses. It makes one sit down. It loosens the grip of urgency. It allows the ordinary thing to become strange again.
The Underground measures a journey in minutes and stops.
This book measures it in centuries.
The next station is not merely another place.
It is another London.