The strangeness of station names

In Kyiv they have voted to change the names of some metro stations. Heroes of the Dnieper is to become Heroes of Ukraine. The station was named after the street outside, and there’s nothing wrong with the river Dnieper, which winds its S-shape through Ukraine like the Grand Canal through Venice.

The trouble was that the counter-offensive in 1943 by the Soviet Union against the German invaders made much propaganda of a united effort by all nations under the Marxist flag, even though Stalin had not so long before presided over a famine that killed millions in Ukraine.

Another Kyiv metro station is changing its name from Minsk to Warsaw. Again there is nothing wrong with Minsk. It was an ornament to the wireless tuner, along with Hilversum and other mysterious transmitting spots. It just happens that Belarus, of which Minsk is the capital, is run by a tyrant and enemy of Ukraine.

I hope we do not get fussy about names on the London Underground. The biggest problem so far has been confusion, in which natives tend to glory. Thus Tottenham Court Road is nowhere near Tottenham, let alone Tottenham Hale. Embankment station used to be Charing Cross, and Charing Cross was Trafalgar Square or Strand, while Aldwych was Strand before 1915 and after 1979, and then nothing. ‘You’re never alone with a Strand,’ the cigarette slogan went. But now there are none left.

Occasionally royalism overcomes mundanity. The Fleet line was built for two and a half miles from Baker Street to Charing Cross and opened as the Jubilee line in 1979 (also cannibalising a branch of the portmanteau Bakerloo line), two years after the Queen’s Silver Jubilee. This week we gained the Elizabeth line, over which the Queen cast a cheery eye last week, with ten new stations (using extant names) built by the Crossrail company.

Last year a new Underground station, Nine Elms, opened. The name was first taken by the railway terminus that opened in 1838, an inconveniently long way from central London. The new station has a sign outside: Nine Elms Station. This should logically mean that the next station, Battersea Power Station, should have a sign: Battersea Power Station Station. But logic doesn’t come into it.