I’ve featured a lot of alternative London Underground maps on the site over the years, but this one has to be the most delightfully bonkers one yet and I love it. Each line on the map consists only of stations that share part of their name with each other: so there’s a line for all the stations which have “Park” in their name, for “North”, “South” and other directions and so on. Interchanges occur when a station name contains two different shared elements: “Wood Green” is on both the Wood line and the Green line, for example.
It’s all rather clever, if not exactly useful for any purpose apart from being clever, but I do appreciate the attention to detail. There’s even an “Ampersand” line, as there’s a surprisingly large number of stations that feature one (six, to be precise). The Heathrow Terminal stations get a special double line, as all their names feature both “Heathrow” and “Terminal”. There are five odd-ball lines off to the bottom left that follow the rules but don’t interchange with the main interconnected system, which look a bit strange at first glance. However, they’re probably dealt with as best they can be.
Ali’s rules for inclusion are pretty simple: Underground stations only (no Overground, Tfl Rail, tram or Air Line stations here), and only full words get lines (so there’s no lines for recurring suffixes or prefixes like -gate, -ton, or wood-). There’s one slight exception I can see where “Northwood Hills” (plural) sneaks onto the “Hill” (singular) line, presumably in order to add the one station “Northwood” spur. Of the 267 unique Underground station names, 172 appear on this map, which is impressive!
Head on over Ali’s blog to read more about the project, as well as many, many other Tube map variants.
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