There’s a new document on the TfL website today, talking about the Northern Line extension upon which work has started and if it all goes to plan will be complete and open by 2020.

There’s just one odd thing we’ve noticed .. and that’s the name of the two new stations. They’ve all been marked as Nine Elms and Battersea on previous mock-up maps, but now it seems as if someone’s taken the decision to call the latter ‘Battersea Power Station‘ instead. Which is great … were it not for the fact that it’s ridiculous.

Battersea Power Station itself will not longer exist by the same the station opens, so it’ll be named after something that isn’t there (even if historically it is still known), and everyone will just call what it should be called anyway, which is ‘Battersea‘.  Plus that fact that it’ll be the first tube station to have the word ‘station’ in the official names, and then you’ll be able to say in a sentence, “I’m getting the train to Battersea Power Station station”.

TfL have form for doing this though – why have a short name which fits better onto a small map, when three longer words will do instead?  We can’t have ‘Vicarage Road’ on the Met as everyone will call it – no, it’s going to be called ‘Watford Vicarage Road’ instead because we’re all too stupid to know that it’s in Watford.

So … Battersea tube opens in 2020. Please remember to call it that …

(Also if we’re being really picky, we suspect that the new Northern Line will be dug deeper than the existing Victoria Line, meaning that that here it should go under the Victoria line, not on top of it. But you know … that’s really picky).

Battersea Station Station