Phil Clark wrote:



"St Giles Circus" would clearly be a better name for the station, as
it more clearly locates the station - TCR is quite a long road and has
two other stations on it. Personally I think that street names should
only be used if they are very short streets and therefore the position
of the station is fairly obvious.


I apologise, firstly, for being a bit tardy responding to this posting,
but I only caught up with the rather interesting thread yesterday. I
agree with Phil that the logical name for Tottenham Court Road would
have been either 'St Giles' or 'St Giles Circus' But I can understand
why neither of those names were used. St. Giles was one of the worst
areas in London - the St. Giles rookeries were a by-word for
degradation, crime and squalor. Peter Ackroyd's London, the Biography
devotes an entire chapter to the area (Pp 131-143). The area might have
improved by the time the tube arrived, but memories would still be
alive as to what it had been like. One can imagine the mutton-chopped
Directors of the CLR sitting around the board room, shaking their heads
and saying they couldn't have their beautiful new electric railway
associated with such. Calling the station 'Charing Cross Road' would
only lead to confusion with the mainline station, nearly a mile away,
so the settled on the only other alternative.

By the time the Charing Cross, Euston & Hampstead Railway came 6 or 7
years later, running under Tottenham Court Road with stations at Warren
Street and Goodge Street on, or just off Tottenham Court Road the
stations had to be called such, although logically Goodge Street
should be more properly called TCR as the station lies on that latter
thoroughfare.

Incidentally, I spent the first 12 years of my working life in an
office at 1 Oxford Street, built on nearly top of the TCR booking hall
- but actually it wasn't in Oxford Street, but round the corner in
Charing Cross Road (and from the windows of which I watched Centre
Point built, but that's another story) - so the confusion doesn't only
lie with the names of tube stations!