Reni Eddo-Lodge and Emma Watson to redraw London tube map with women's names

Londoners Reni Eddo-Lodge and Emma Watson are spearheading a project to reimagine the city’s iconic tube map, by renaming all 270 stops after the women and non-binary people who have shaped the history of each pocket of the capital.

Eddo-Lodge, author of the bestselling Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People about Race, and the actor and activist Watson, were inspired by a similar project in the book Nonstop Metropolis by Rebecca Solnit and geographer Joshua Jelly-Schapiro, which featured a New York City subway map with all the stations renamed after great women. Both Solnit and Schapiro are working with Eddo-Lodge and Watson to help create the City of Women London.

Early suggestions range from Mary Seacole and Mary Wollstonecraft to Amy Winehouse, Zadie Smith, Jung Chang and Virginia Woolf.

“The project aims to identify remarkable female or non-binary Londoners who have had an impact on the city’s history in some way. It will allocate them to each of the stations depicted on the London tube map according to their connections to a local area,” say the organisers. “Some of these people might be household names, others might be unsung heroes or figures from London’s hidden histories. The names might be drawn from arts, civil society, business, politics, sport and so on.”

The organisers hope the map will “further contribute to the way London is imagined, navigated, and lived”, and say that “we will never think of the tube – or public space – the same way again”.

Working in partnership with the WOW Foundation, the project is planning to consult historians, writers, curators, museums and librarians on potential names, as well as asking the public to submit their own ideas. The project will be published by Haymarket Books on International Women’s Day 2021, on 8 March.

“How does it impact our imaginations that so many places in so many cities are named after men and so few after women? What kind of landscape do we move through when streets and parks and statues and bridges are gendered … and it’s usually one gender, and not another? What kind of silence arises in places that so seldom speak of and to women?” asked Solnit in 2019, after a new version of the New York map was released with new names including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Cardi B.

Solnit said her map “was made to sing the praises of the extraordinary women who have, since the beginning, been shapers and heroes of this city that has always been, secretly, a City of Women. And why not the subway? This is a history still emerging from underground, a reminder that it’s all connected, and that we get around.”