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So what do ‘canaries’ and ‘herons’ have to do with the docks? What exactly was the ‘poplar’ or the ‘mudchute’. The London Underground and DLR have some pretty curious station names, and in the East End we have some of the more bizarre.

Aldgate Station was opened on 18 November 1876, and is named after one of the four original gates in the wall of the City, built by the Saxons, rebuilt in 1609 but finally taken down in 1761. The gate which once spanned the road between Dukes Place and Jewry Street, was once thought to derive its name from ‘old gate’, though the Saxon root is ‘Aelgate’, meaning ‘open to all gate’ or free in other words). The derivation of Aldgate East station is fairly obvious, though the halt, opened on 6 October 1884, was originally to be called Commercial Road. The station was moved a short way east in 1938.

There are some arguments about the derivation of the name Bethnal Green. The green is obvious enough (though there is little of that left) and the area was known as Blithehale during the 13th century. There was a family named Blida here during the early middle ages and the Bythe stream once flowed through the area. Before the station was opened as part of the Central Line extension on 4 December 1946 there was some debate as to whether it should be called simply ‘Bethnal’ to distinguish it from the LNER station a few minutes away.

On the same day, the new Mile End station opened with Central Line trains; the station had first opened in June 1902 as part of the Whitchapel and Bow Railway (W&BR), one of the many midget operations that abounded in London at the time. Mile End is so called because of its position on the main London-Colchester road (the main thoroughfare from Roman times). ‘La Mile ende’, as it was recorded in 1288, was a hamlet a mile east of Aldgate.

The only other stops on the W&BR were Whitchapel, Stepney Green, Bow Road and Bromley. Stepney is recorded as Stibenhede in the Domesday Book, coming from Stebbing (a family name) and hithe (meaning ‘landing place’, think Rotherhithe). Stepney remains though the green is much reduced. Whitechapel owes its name to the white stone chapel of St Mary Matfelon, which dated from 1329. After several rebuildings and World War 2 bomb damage, it was eventually demolished in 1952. This station predates the W&BR, opening in 1876 with the extension of the East London Railway north from Wapping to Liverpool Street.

The W&BR eventually joined up with the District Railway and ran into Tower Hill station (which of course gets its name from the rise next to the Tower of London). To inject a dash of the confusion so beloved of London Underground, the station has been renamed (originally Seething Lane was an option before it was opened as Mark Lane in 1884). It got the name Tower Hill in 1946, and was then moved in 1967 to the site of the old Tower of London station (open for just two years in the 1880s). Clear enough? Good.

The district of Bow, of course, owes its name to the arched or bowed bridge built over the River Lea in the 12th century. The main road east out of the City thus became the Bow Road. The current Bow Road tube station opened in 1902 but was one of only three stations within a few yards of each other. There was also a Bow Road station on the Great Eastern Line (the old station building is between the Ferrodo rail bridge and the Little Driver pub), and Bow station on the North London Railway (now the site of Bow Church DLR station).

Just down the line from Bow, Bromley station was opened on the London, Tilbury and Southend Railway (the modern Fenchurch Street Line) in 1858. It was taken over by the London Underground in 1902 and renamed Bromley-by-Bow in 1968. Records from the year 1000 have Bromley as Braembelege, from the Old English broom (tree) and leah (forest).

The new Docklands tube and DLR stations tend to hark back to the days when these were docks proper. Canary Wharf station dates from 1987, but the original Canary Wharf was built in 1936, a nod to the Canary Island imports which were a mainstay of the area’s trade. West India Quay was once the West India Dock. This seems to follow a post-industrial naming tradition in London - just as Surrey Docks became Surrey Quays, so the southern part of the West India Dock became South Quay, and a nesting place for Herons became Heron Quays. A neat theory that breaks down once we get to the old East India Docks: the station is plain East India.

The medieval ‘Bleak wall’ was a shipyard from the 16th century, and became the entrance to the West India Docks in the 1800s. Today the ships are gone and we have Blackwall station. Crossharbour, meanwhile, was the functional name invented for the new development at the centre of the Isle of Dogs, the station losing its ‘London Arena’ appendage in 2007 after the arena was demolished. The name Mudchute is similarly prosaic - lying next to an artificial hill created by the dredging of mud from the Millwall dock down the years. Island Gardens, meanwhile, lies next to the formal gardens laid out on former wasteland at the tip of the Isle of Dogs in 1895 by the London County Council.

And Poplar? Well, in the absence of documentary proof, historians have to fall back on that reliable mainstay … guesswork and a bit of cheating. Many sources have it as ‘probably’ a poplar tree that served as a meeting place for local folk.

For more (loads more) see ‘What’s in a name’ by Cyril M Harris, which documents the origins of the names of all current stations on the Tube and DLR. A London Transport Museum publication, ISBN 9781854142412, £4.95.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 5th, 2009 at 2:21 pm and is filed under Beneath London, London book reviews, London transport. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.