Today's the day trains start operating on the Northern line extension. You won't be able to catch one because today's only a dress rehearsal - all southbound passengers are being detrained at Kennington - but the new timetable is now underway. Your ability to take a ride starts at 05:28tomorrow.
Tomorrow's also the day that thousands more people will discover there's a station called Battersea Power Station station. Let the LOLs be unconfined.
It's a tiny unexpected nugget, the kind of thing you might nudge your partner and tell them, either with a smile or a grumpy "well I wouldn't have named it like that". It's going to get a reaction of some sort whenever you discover it. What intrigues me is quite how long that takes.
The timeline of a shareable thing can be a long one. Someone has to notice or announce the thing in the first place. Awareness of the thing climbs as the information spreads. Events can sometimes cause the rate of spread to spike. Eventually fewer people are left to discover the thing but they still act excitedly when they do. Even years later people will continue to share it, assuming nobody else has heard it before because they hadn't, while the rest of the population look on thinking "oh, that old chestnut again".
Battersea Power Station station is firmly in my chestnut zone. I discovered the name of the station six years ago, and blogged about it, and collectively we had a 38-comment discussion about the dissonance of it all. Readers of diamond geezer were early to the Battersea Power Station station party. It's only because I'm the kind of person who reads TfL project pages, or maybe because somebody nudged me to read them - I don't remember - but I got over the idea that the station's nomenclature was amazing some time ago.
I did not react with glee when somebody messaged me on Twitter last week to tell me that the station would be called Battersea Power Station station. I did not rise to the bait when someone else commented that the sign outside Battersea Power Station station should say Battersea Power Station Station. I kept quiet, as I have on many previous occasions, because it's polite to keep your indifference to yourself.
A similar level of commotion has come from people discovering that Battersea Power Station and Nine Elms are to be in zone 1. This has been public knowledge since 2014 when the Northern Line extension was commissioned, indeed I blogged about it at the time, but most people are only now waking up to the fact that this will be the case. Feel free to be surprised, but technically this is old news and some of us have known for seven years.
All of which exemplifies the awkward topic of whether it's right to tell someone something you think they might not know. If they don't know then you've scored brownie points for bringing fresh information to their attention, indeed something they might otherwise never have discovered. But if they do know then you've essentially wasted their time, and you might only end up feeling foolish.
For those on the receiving end it can be exciting to be told new things, but also frustrating if the other person only ever tells you stuff you already knew. The problem is that they didn't know you knew, they could only guess, and in this case they guessed wrong. I don't particularly enjoy it when people tell me excitedly about something I've already blogged about, but I have to remember they might not have been reading at the time, nor be capable of checking back, it's not deliberate ignorance.
The existence of Battersea Power Station station is a facile example, but any underlying factual disconnect can be really important in society. Who knows what, and who knows who knows what, sits at the very heart of our democracy because facts decide opinions.
If you know a fact about something you might then decide to vote one way on a particular topic. If you don't know that fact you might fill in the gaps inappropriately, or rely instead on misinformation, and vote a different way. It's in politicians' interests that you know as much as possible about some things and as little as possible about others.
Here are some Battersea-related examples, all culled from responses to a single tweet made by the Mayor last week.
Yes, a self serving personal tube station for the luxury flat buyers that not only dodges the law about building affordable homes, making you a hypocrite, but sells off yet more of London's real estate to unregulated foreign landlords & adds little benefit to any other Londoners (@chaosityuk)
Allowing Battersea PS to be in Zone 1 is corruption in broad daylight. (@dadge)
Oh great now we’re all connected to those luxury apartments and shops that only the super rich can afford. Thanks Sadiq you must be so proud glad I pay taxes for this! (@roryfcjames)
Zone 1! How much did the Nine Elms lot put towards your mayoral campaign? (@ed1231)
These are all people screaming at the Mayor for decisions taken by his predecessor over which he had no subsequent control. It's all too easy to shake your fist at government without realising which particular politician put that decision in place or who was pulling the strings. Sadiq's taken full responsibility for several decisions you might well hate, but this is not one of them. Despising him for delivering the Northern Line extension means your opinions are based on assumptions rather than facts.... and that's a dangerously easy thing to do.
Let's not get carried away and blame everything on ignorance. Complex issues like Brexit, party allegiance and who to vote for in elections are based on a whole raft of facts and opinions, not just one thing you might or might not know. But it pays to be aware of what's going on and to realise that you might not know everything. In particular it pays to question whether the truths you think you know are actually genuine, else society can all too easily end up in a misguided pit of populism.
Sharing facts is good, even if you've heard them before, rather than encouraging ignorance and misinformation. Just try not to share them too often because a lot of us already know the thing you think is thrillingly new.
Yes, from tomorrow there's a station called Battersea Power Station station. You'll get over it.
