How do you get from Chancery Lane to St Paul's using London Underground stations?
Easy: "Chancery Lane" shares a word with "Wood Lane", "Wood Lane" shares a word with "St John's Wood", and "St John's Wood" shares a word with "St Paul's". Probably not the route you expected!
This network of word-association connects a large proportion of the stations of the London Underground. To help navigate this network, I've put together the map below:
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| Tube Map of Shared Words |
A few points of trivia about the map:
- Certain colours are used for certain categories of words: for example, light and dark blue are used for directions. I tried to avoid two lines of the same colour being too close together.
- Only full words get lines (so no parts of words like -gate, -ton or wood-) but I did group plurals ("Gardens", "Hills" and "Terminals") with their corresponding singulars.
- As far as possible, stations are arranged alphabetically along each line (for example: North Acton, Clapham North, North Ealing, North Greenwich ...).
- Only London Underground stations appear on the map: there's no Overground, Tram, DLR, TfL Rail or Air Line. There are 270 stations of the London Underground, but only 267 station names, since the names "Paddington", "Hammersmith" and "Edgware Road" correspond to two stations each.
- 172 station names appear on the map. The remaining 95 station names don't share any words with any other station names. I have a plan for what to do with these stations – but that will be something for a future post.
