St John's Wood tube station

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St John's Wood
Location
Place	St John's Wood
Local authority	Westminster
Operations
Managed by	London Underground
Platforms in use	2
Transport for London
Zone	2
Annual entry/exit	5.362 million †
History
Key dates	Opened 1939
Transport for London List of London stations: Underground \| National Rail
† Data from Transport for London [1]
London Transport Portal

St John's Wood tube station is a London Underground station at St John's Wood. It is on the Jubilee Line, between Swiss Cottage and Baker Street. It is in Travelcard Zone 2.

The station was opened on 20 November 1939 on a new section of deep-level tunnel constructed between Baker Street and Finchley Road when the Metropolitan Line's services on its Stanmore branch were transferred to the Bakerloo Line. It was subsequently transferred along with the rest of the Stanmore branch to the Jubilee Line when it opened in 1979.

With the opening of St John's Wood station, two nearby stations on the Metropolitan Line were closed. These were Lord's (which had originally been opened in 1868 as St John's Wood Road) and Marlborough Road.

The station building is located on the corner of Acacia Road and Wellington Road and tube maps from late 1938 and early 1939 indicate that it was originally to be given the name Acacia Road or Acacia. This station is the nearest one to Lord's Cricket Ground and Abbey Road Studios. For this reason Beatles memorabilia is sold at the station.

It is rumoured that St John's Wood Station is being considered for closure by Transport For London.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Trivia

In recent years, the station has achieved a small amount of notoriety due to it being the only London Underground station that has no letters in common with the word 'mackerel', a fact that has frequently appeared in quizzes since the fact was inexplicably publicised. The word 'mackerel' is by no means unique in this feat, however, as several hundred words ('algebra', 'blackberry', 'paperclip'...) satisfy the same property of having letters in common with all stations except St John's Wood.

Furthermore, St John's Wood is not unique in being able to satisfy such a restriction, and there are at least 84 stations for which words exist that have no letters in common with exactly one station (for example 'wavelength' and Oxford Circus; 'photocopying' and Russell Square).

There are a number of stations which do not share letters with other stations. In fact, there are 61 stations which have just one station with which they do not share any letters, such as Barbican (only Temple does not share letters) and Liverpool Street (only Bank does not share letters).

Incidentally, the Washington Metro has only one station that does not have any of the letters of "mackerel" in its name, Huntington.

The station does contain the second rarest letter on the London Underground - "J". Only St John's Wood, St James's Park and Willesden Junction contain the letter "J". The rarest letter is "Z" which is only found in Belsize Park.