Confused by the tube? You’re not alone

Stare at the tube map long enough, and you’ll notice it. West of the hubbub of central London’s stations, another part of the city is saturated with tube connections. It’s not bustling Notting Hill or the interchanges of Earl’s Court, but leafy Acton. It’s home to no less than seven different stations: North Acton, East Acton, Acton Town, Acton Main Line, South Acton, West Acton and Acton Central. Most are just a short walk from each other. The figure would be even higher if they hadn’t renamed the Acton Green station to Chiswick Park. But how did a small, unremarkable corner of suburbia end up with such a concentration of different stations that rivals even the city centre?

The strangeness of the Acton situation is far from unique, however. In fact, the underground is more than a little nonsensical. Alongside the big question — how can the tube be so concentrated in central and north London but can’t cover pretty much any of the south east? — there’s a host of smaller, no less perplexing issues: the fact that Charing Cross station is an obscenely short distance away from the nearby, but very separate, Embankment. Or that to swap lines at Hammersmith or Edgware Road you have to exit and re-enter different station buildings just a few hundred metres away from each other.

You might be forgiven for thinking that whoever designed this system was mad. But the truth is much more bizarre: the tube wasn’t really designed at all. And understanding how and why that came to be doesn’t just help explain the tube’s often head-scratching present design, but the constraints that are secretly shaping its future.