Next stop, Sylvia Plath! Why it’s time to redraw the London Underground map | International Women’s Day

WWhen I was a baby feminist, I argued with friends that public space was political. I had been radicalized by my teenage years, fed up with street harassment from men who seemed to think the streets were theirs to roam freely while women were relegated to decoration. It didn’t happen regularly, but it happened often enough to make me angry. Walking home from school in London in uniform, I had been followed, ripped my arm, and approached at least once by a man who showed stalking tendencies. As I got older, I took these actions as a display of dominance and felt disgusted. In addition to my outrage, I was deeply disappointed. Growing up in this city, I hated that this type of behavior was an obstacle to my youthful desire for autonomy and freedom.

At this point, I had been riding public transit on my own for years, and it took me anywhere I wanted to go. Once I had exhausted my immediate vicinity on foot, I took the Piccadilly line to concerts at the now paved Astoria on Charing Cross Road. I would hop on the Hammersmith and City Line, a portal to dancing all day at the Notting Hill Carnival. The Circle line made me feel like an intellectual in the museums of South Kensington. Back then, there was no way to offload travel plans to a clever little app, so to get anywhere, like everyone else, I had to study the subway map to figure out how to get there. Sometimes, if I was feeling brave, I’d hop on the tube at Turnpike Lane and work it out while walking on, peering at the mini-maps in the train carriage and awkwardly towering over whoever sat in the seat below. I didn’t need a car. The map in my pocket opened up my city.

From left: Helen Sharman (High Street Kensington), Mary Seacole (Paddington), Sylvia Plath (Swiss Cottage) and Jane Goodall (Regent’s Park). Composite: Guardian design; Alamy; Damian Dovarganes/AP

Amazement, exploration, ownership, reclaiming – these are all feelings I was hoping to replicate when Emma Watson approached me to be part of a project reinventing Transport for London’s iconic tube map. Together with the American author Rebecca Solnit we have replaced every channel name with the name of a woman. Watson had spoken to Solnit a few years ago, who had recently completed a book with geographer Joshua Jelly-Schapiro. Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas is a book of essays highlighting stories of the city, supplemented with 26 maps. One of the maps is a recreation of the Metropolitan Transport Authority’s New York City Subway map. At each of the MTA’s 472 subway stations, the original name has been replaced by the name of a woman or a woman-led collective. The names were contemporary and historical, including entertainment industry figures, writers, artists, women’s rights activists, and a former First Lady of the United States. Instead of subway stations named Penn Station, Bleecker Street, and Grand Central, there was a station named for Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable, a station named for musician Grace Jones, and a station named after the much-revered black lesbian poet Audre Lorde.

In her conversation with Solnit, Watson had expressed admiration for this feminist version of the New York subway plan, and Solnit had immediately suggested creating a London version.

The subway map has been redesigned many times. Simon Patterson’s 1992 lithograph The Great Bear is the best known. In this work, subway stations are named after famous people, including religious figures, footballers, and philosophers. A version of the Tube Map published by the Guardian in 2006 attempted to illustrate the connections between different British musicians and music genres.

Rebecca Solnit and Emma Watson.
Rebecca Solnit and Emma Watson. Photo: PR

Turner Prize winner Lubaina Himid’s 2011 work Moments and Connections also reflected the subway map. A retrospective map of three key exhibitions she curated in the 1980s, bringing Black and Asian British women artists from the edges to the center, an artery-like line bisects the center, naming nearly all the artists she has exhibited. Their names are intersected by tube lines highlighting the creative groups, educational institutions, exhibitions and publications that were crucial to Britain’s black arts movement. The map was created ahead of Himid’s Thin Black Line(s) 2012 exhibition at Tate Britain. More recently, in 2017, art collective Thick/er Black Lines released a version of the card, entitled We Apologize For the Delay to Your Journey, which highlights unsung black British women and femmes of the art world. And in 2021, Transport for London, together with the Black Cultural Archives, released a black history tube map that spotlights the historical contributions of black Londoners to the city. Anyone redesigning the map knows in their bones that there is power in a name.

So many different maps, so much brilliant work. But today’s official subway map only has three stops named after women. The Seven Sisters station is named after the Hibbert sisters who lived in the late 1800s and are known for planting a tree each in the area. The other two stations are named after Queen Victoria (the obvious one – Victoria Station; but Lancaster Gate is also named after one of her royal titles).

In fact, many London Underground station names honor landowners or members of the monarchy. The average Tube traveler might not know that Leicester Square was named after Robert Sidney, 2nd Earl of Leicester, or Latimer Road station after wealthy merchant Edward Latymer. But each man’s legacy lives on in the naming. So many statues and place names evoke the power of their time and signal that the general public should be concerned with deference to those who amass capital or own land.

The City of Women London map centers various values. This card celebrates women and non-binary people with deep connections to the city. These are people who have achieved extraordinary things in their field, reached new heights or served as the nucleus of social movements. We have tried our best to place each woman or non-binary person at a station relevant to their life, whether they lived, grew up, organized or worked in the area.

From left: Noor Inayat Khan (Euston Square), Virginia Woolf (Warren Street), Mishal Husain (Great Portland Street) and Dina Asher-Smith (Willesden Junction).
From left: Noor Inayat Khan (Euston Square), Virginia Woolf (Warren Street), Mishal Husain (Great Portland Street) and Dina Asher-Smith (Willesden Junction). Composite: Guardian design; CWGC/PA; Alamy; David Vintiner/The Guardian; PA

Some of our stations are named after wealthy people, but they’re not on the map just for their wealth. Some are British, others were born abroad. On this map are people who have expanded the possibilities of what a woman could be. Among them are Claudia Jones, the journalist, black feminist and one of the founders of the Notting Hill Carnival, and the fashion designer Vivienne Westwood, whose clothing has left an indelible mark on London through the legacy of its punk scene.

Some of our subway stations celebrate collectives rather than individuals. Their names represent historic sites of women-led protest. We placed two black feminist organizations – Awaz, the British Asian women’s collective; and Owaad, the Organization of Women of African and Asian Descent – in Heathrow Terminals 2 and 3. In 1979 they organized a picket line at Heathrow to protest the British government’s invasive virginity tests on the arrival of migrant women.

At the opposite end of the map, we had no other option for Bow Road other than the Match Girls. Another powerful women’s collective active in London’s East End nearly 100 years earlier, the 1,400 working-class women and girls who worked at Bryant & May’s match factory in Bow went on strike and changed the course of the British labor movement.

Our map also evokes scenes of tragedy. Victoria Station is being renamed after transport worker Belly Mujinga, who died of complications from Covid-19 during the first UK lockdown.

City of Women...Reni Eddo-Lodge with the redesigned subway plan.
City of Women…Reni Eddo-Lodge with the redesigned subway plan. Photo: Suki Dhanda/The Guardian

The now-closed Holloway Women’s Prison also occupies a spot on the map. It is a place where feminist activists have long been imprisoned for their political actions, from suffragists in the early 20th century to the women of the Greenham Common peace camp in the 1980s. Feminist direct-action group Sisters Uncut occupied the visitor center in 2017, writing in the Guardian: “Prisons are an inhumane response to the social problems faced by vulnerable women.” One of those vulnerable women was Sarah Reed, a young black woman with a history of mental illness health problems, who was found dead in her cell in 2016 after being denied proper medical care. Just four years earlier, she faced an incident of appalling brutality, including by the state, when she was attacked by a Metropolitan Police officer who had accused her of shoplifting. The police officer was later convicted of mutual assault for the attack. By marking these tragedies, we want to commemorate people who have failed from our society as well as those who have defied the odds.

London has long been a place of protest, common cause, collectivism and collaboration. It is a city where decadence and extreme poverty live side by side. It’s a place where women from all over the world have moved to express themselves in their true selves, often in collaboration with each other. This map may not be world changing, but I hope it inspires you to take a second look at places you might have previously taken for granted, imagine the lives of the women before you, and ponder the possibilities of what You could create. This map contradicts any claim that the city is not for us.

The City of Women London Poster by Reni Eddo-Lodge, Rebecca Solnit and Emma Watson will be published by Haymarket Books on 8th March 2022.

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