Monday, October 19, 2009

People with the same name as Tube Stations

What started as a mis-reading of yesterday's post by Tom Phillips has led into a little London Undeground experiment. Tom mis-read my post on Twitter about interviewing Mr Warwick Avenue and that led to the question "Ah I thought you were interviewing someone really called Warwick Avenue". This led me to idly wonder on Twitter, whether anyone shared the same name as a Tube station. It pays to never idly wonder anything on Twitter as shortly afterwards people were Tweeting names of people (real & imagined) who had the same names as stations.

Do you know anyone named after a Tube Station

First off the mark with a real name was Sahra T who found Warren Street. Not content with that she also found a guy called Brent Cross!

By now a hashtag #peoplewhoaretubestations had been devised by Chris Applegate. Tom found several Richard Mansworth' s on Facebook - surely one of them must be called Rick. TheJT found a Ken Ton on LinkedIn and searching on Facebook led to many others. Terence Eden made the fair point that everyone seems to pronounce Harrow & Wealdstone as Harold Wilson.

Photo of Colin Dale by Andrew Shaylor

Having the same name as a station seems to necessitate that you do some sort of masculine job so you don't get picked on. Chris found a muscular looking designer & tattooist called Colin Dale. Whereas Michael Hanley found a ex-lion tamer called Stan More.

Morus1516 did really well and found some of my favourites: an architect called Ed G Ware (well Edward G Ware, but surely his friends called him Ed), a woman called Mary-Lebone and a guy called Will Edson Green

There's a whole fleet of Lewis Ham's on Facebook and WildeWilde used to go to school with a chap called Wes Tham

We must be missing more! Did you go to school with a Leyton Stone? I'm pretty sure there must be some Deb Dens and Perry Vales around. Failing that - if there's any more puntastic imagined names you can come up with like Anthony Gladman's suggestion of Stephen Bury after he joined the army and became Gunner S Bury, they'd be most welcome. I think TfL should let them all have free travel for a year if they got them all to pose for pictures at the relevant stations!

UPDATE - Thanks to the Telegraph for featuring this as a "craze"! Not sure I'd go that far, but it's fun seeing how many real Tube station people exist.

Also I was featured talking about all this on BBC World Service last week at about 49 mins, 42 seconds into this show.

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