In excitingnews for residents of Kennington, its tube station is about to be nudged from zone 2 to the boundary of zones 1 & 2. The change will have absolutely no effect on fares to/from any other stations, not yet. But expect it to bring broader passenger benefits in four months' time.
What's happening in September is the opening of the Northern line extension, a shiny transport bauble courtesy of developers redefining riverside Wandsworth. Trains that would normally have turned back at Kennington will instead continue to new stations at Nine Elms (for Sainsbury's and gaudy towers) and Battersea Power Station (for reimagined heritage and gaudy towers). Both these stations need to be in Zone 1 for prestige reasons, so intermediate Kennington needs to be nudged into zone 1 too. And because the only fares software update before September is this weekend, Kennington needs to be nudged into zone 1 now.
Short term it means very little. Fares on the Northern line south of Kennington won't change because Kennington remains in zone 2. But journeys from Kennington to zone 1 (or from zone 1 to Kennington) will be cheaper because the entire journey will now be in one zone. Off peak the fare drops from £2.50 to £2.40, so peanuts, whereas at peak times it falls from £3 to £2.40. A Kennington-Moorgate commuter might save £300 a year as a result, so that's nice.
Technically it's a little more complicated than that. TfL operate a secret special offer called Short Distance Cross Boundary Journeys whereby peak journeys that creep across the Z1/2 boundary only pay the Z1 fare. For Kennington this means that rush hour journeys to Bank, Borough, Charing Cross, Embankment, Lambeth North, London Bridge, Monument and Waterloo already only cost £2.40. Nothing changes if you're only going a few stops. But anyone travelling deeper into zone 1 (or travelling off peak) will start saving money from Sunday, hurrah.
Stations don't normally switch zones because many people would end up paying more. But shifting a station onto a zone boundary is fine because no passenger loses out, only TfL who end up collecting less in fares. Don't worry, Kennington's shift was agreed last summer by TfL's new overlords at the Department for Transport so the loss in income has been rubberstamped from on high.
Also it's not normally the done thing for two consecutive stations to be on a zone boundary. Vauxhall and Kennington are distinct because they're on different lines, but Kennington and Elephant & Castle are adjacent Northern line stations and that's unusual. But there is precedent here, notably the creation of a blurry Z2/3 boundary around Stratford in 2016, so practicality does sometimes outweigh network purity.
Kennington's shift to the Z1/2 boundary might look OK on the tube map (whenever that's updated, everything in today's post is an unofficial mock-up) but it looks odder in real life. Here's a map showing zone 1 stations in yellow, zone 2 stations in red and stations on the Z1/2 boundary in orange. The three stations on the Northern line extension (Battersea Power Station, Nine Elms and Kennington) have a black ring around them.
Kennington turning from red to orange extends the edge of zone 1 much further into South London than TfL have ever admitted before. Meanwhile that odd-looking yellow bulge is the result of extending zone 1 to include Battersea and Nine Elms. This is an attempt to placemake a new neighbourhood south of the Thames in an area that's always been relatively inaccessible from central London - a situation the Northern Line Extension is intended to change. The most jarring outcome is the proximity of Battersea Power Station station (zone 1, yellow) to Battersea Park station (zone 2, red), highlighting that the incomer has been granted numerical prominence entirely subjectively.
The awkwardness of adding these two new Z1 stations is revealed if you attempt to draw an imaginary zone 1 boundary across the map.
Before the arrival of the Northern Line Extension you could have drawn a smooth line sweeping north of Kennington and stuck closer to the river. But the introduction of a third Z1/2 station forces the line to wiggle irregularly, compelling any Z1 boundary to bend inwards. The discrepancy arises because Nine Elms has been granted full-on Z1 status but Vauxhall, closer in, remains boundary 1/2. It'd make total geographic sense to redefine Vauxhall as Z1 only, but that'll never happen because it'd penalise Victoria line passengers.
It's interesting to look back at the Planning Inspectorate's 2014 report and the representations businesspeople made to ensure that the two new stations ended up in zone 1. The Director of the St James Group building consortium said Z1 would be a great benefit and allow good integration with the remainder of Central London. The Chief Executive of the Vauxhall One BID didn't want new residents paying a £300 annual penalty for living in zone 2. That Chief Executive became a founding member of Leave EU two years later, then progressed to chairman of the Brexit Party, was elected to the European Parliament in 2019 and last week failed to gain a seat on the London Assembly.
In four months' time, according to the very latest committee minutes, two brand new stations will appear on the tube map. Squeezing them in is going to be made much more difficult by the need to show the Z1/2 boundary in the correct place, with the location of Vauxhall likely to be the design's sticking point. This is my attempt in which I've been forced to drag Vauxhall away from the river, geographically unhappily, in order to confirm that a Northern line journey from central London to Battersea Power Station is all within zone 1.
And it's the need to encourage through-journeys which explains why Kennington gets to be in Zone 1 from Sunday. Nobody wants residents of the Vauxhall, Nine Elms, Battersea Opportunity Area to have to pay extra to travel into central London, and nobody wants people in central London to have to pay extra to go shopping at the power station. It's all about lubricating the wheels of capitalism, because that's the only reason tube lines get extended these days.
But this new zoning won't be quite such good news for residents of South London heading up the Northern line and changing to the new extension. Kennington may be in zones 1 and 2 but Battersea Power Station and Nine Elms are only going to be in zone 1 so visitors from the south will be expected to pay a premium to travel there. It'll be cheaper to get out at Vauxhall and walk.
