08 May 2019

Map of Tubewhacks and Mackerel Facts

St John's Wood is the only London Underground station whose name contains none of the letters in the word "mackerel".

The above statement is one of the most famous nuggets of Tube knowledge. It the favourite trivia question of Victoria Coren Mitchell, host of Only Connect (a quiz show which, for context, once asked its contestants to find the fourth item in the sequence "Central = 1", "Circle = 2", "District = 3"). On TfL's "Art on the Underground: Labyrinth" entry for St John's Wood, the Mackerel Fact gets top billing, winning priority over the station's other claim to fame: the site of the Beatles' iconic road-crossing album cover.

The notoriety of the Mackerel Fact is driven, in large part, by its pointlessness. It's not a fact that will help you navigate the Tube. The word "mackerel" in itself doesn't have anything obvious to do with the London Underground.

And as many others have pointed out (see, for instance, this blog post) there isn't even anything particularly special about the link between St John's Wood and "mackerel". St John's Wood is the only station whose name lacks all of the letters "a", "e", "l" and "r", so you could get away with replacing "mackerel" with "real" – but "real" is a far less amusing word.

The Mackerel Fact has given rise to the practice of "Tubewhacking", finding words whose letters overlap with every Tube station except one, and many such words exist. Twitter's Tube Mackerel Bot has been tweeting examples of these words since 2017, working its way through the dictionary.

With a little computer assistance, I found "mackerel"-equivalents for 94 of the London Underground's 270 stations. These are mapped below:
Mackerel Map
Mackerel Tube Map
Needless to say, there were many stations with a large number of qualifying Mackerel-matches. For example, Woodford is the only station with none of the letters of "language", or of "intellectual", or of "physician". For these cases, I just picked one of the possible options.

Some stations get a Mackerel-match with other Tube stations. For example, Ruislip is the only Tube station which has none of the letters of "Camden Town". But Camden Town isn't the only station with none of the letters of "Ruislip". There is only one pair of stations which both match with each other: Perivale is the only station with none of the letters of "St John's Wood", and St John's Wood is the only station with none of the letters of "Perivale". So perhaps there is something special about St John's Wood after all!

(In case you were wondering, the fourth item in Only Connect's sequence of Tube lines is "Bakerloo = 4". Each line is numbered according to the points value of the snooker ball with the same colour as that line.)

2 comments:

  1. Ruislip is the only station with none of the letters of "St John's Wood". What about s?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Well spotted! I mean Perivale (not Ruislip), as the map indicates - I've corrected this in the text.

      Delete

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