November catch-up(because some things have moved on)
St Pancras: If you thought you'd "done" St Pancras, how about St Pancras at Christmas? Anything to get some more shoppers and champagne sippers back into the station. There's a shedload of festive activities scheduled inside the station between now and Christmas Eve, some of which you might actually want to attend. Unfortunately you'll have to negotiate the Flash-ridden Christmas at St Pancras website first (you might want to go and brew a cup of eggnog while it loads). While you're there, don't forget to laugh at all the effort that's gone into spelling "Advent Calendar" wrong.
Legible London: As well as the new miniliths on the street, there's also a Legible London exhibition providing further information on the project. Brilliantly it's been located in a tiny, hard-to-locate backwater off Regent Street, outside the trial prototype area. See if you can find the venue before it closes at 4pm on Saturday. Highlights of the exhibition include, apparently, a replica street sign and a free yellow booklet. If you're interested, there's a good example of LL's new pedestrian mapping style on the exhibition flyer.
The tube map: The ugly November 2007 tube map, the one that includes the London Overground, now appears all over the Underground network. But if you thought that was bad, I've seen an early version of the next map, due out in January...
• Remember I mentioned that the East London line closes down just before Christmas and will be replaced by four bus services? Well, from what I've seen, those four bus services are due to appear on the January tube map. And not in a straight line, oh no, they've been staggered so that each bus service is readily identifiable. Just to give you an idea of how messy this looks, consider Canada Water as an example. At the moment Canada Water station appears as a single blue wheelchair-accessible blob. Not next year. From January Canada Water will appear as three linked circles - one blue blob on the Jubilee line, one connection to bus service ELP to Rotherhithe, and one connection to bus service ELC to New Cross Gate. Hideous. Throw in some additional bus symbols, one red dagger at every former ELL station and a big orange information box, and this is visual clutter of an extreme magnitude.
• Oh hell, what's happened to Canary Wharf? It used to be marked as one station, but now it's two (Jubilee and DLR). These two stations are linked not by a line but by a distance (200m), written diagonally, and Heron Quays (150m) has been joined in the same way. If that wasn't bad enough, in real life the Jubilee station is to the east of the DLR but on the new map it appears to the west. Chuck in three red daggers and the resulting accessibility-fuelled carnage has to be seen to be believed.
• In "new station" news, Langdon Park on the DLR will be open before January (we think it'll open next weekend), while Shepherd's Bush station on the London Overground still won't. And Wood Lane station on the Hammersmith & City line is labelled as opening "late 2008".
• There are no stations labelled Heathrow-something any more. Instead there are three stations called "Terminal 1, 2, 3", "Terminal 4" and "Terminal 5 (opens Spring 2008)". Floating around nearby is a chunky blue box labelled Heathrow Airport.
• There are zonal changes out in Hertfordshire which will benefit Oyster customers. Carpenders Park debuts in zone B, while Bushey and Watford High Street appear in zone C. Watford Junction, however, remains outside the zonal system. For a cheaper journey you should take the Metropolitan line instead, where Watford station remains (rather inconsistently) in zone A.
• Various other stations on the London Overground have shifted zone. In every case this is a "good thing". Acton Central moves from Zone 2 to Zone 3, Willesden Junction will be in Zone 2 as well as Zone 3, and (hallelujah) Hampstead Heath finally moves from Zone 3 into Zone 2. That's an awful lot more LO journeys which can now be made within a single zone. Hurrah.
I don't believe that the new January map is available anywhere online (because it's not January yet), but I hear it'll be in the new London Overground timetable. And now even horribler.
