TfL Ref: 1947-2021

Thank you for your request received by us on 28 December 2020 asking for information about the Bank-Monument interchange.

Your request has been considered in accordance with the requirements of the Freedom of Information Act and our information access policy.  I can confirm that we hold the information you require. You asked:

how and why Bank-Monument station is one station internally and operationally - with the same personnel, control room, etcetera - but officially presented and counted as two stations, on maps and TfL literature. It only seems to be counted as one station for operational reasons. Is counting it as two for ease of use?

I know the two stations were separate, then joined together. Has there ever been a proposal to rename all platforms of the whole complex Bank-Monument, as King's Cross-St Pancras is, or just Bank? In that case, it presumably would be counted as one station.

Technically, the area of the station preventing it from being considered as one are the Circle and District platforms. Is it a case of if a platform set has a different name to others, they are considered a separate station, as is the case for several New York Subway stations?

A TfL tweet advised a passenger that Bank and Monument are "the same station": https://twitter.com/TfL/status/1184438491293343744. The passenger disagreed. You do depict it as two stations. I would say that most people treat them interchangeably as both one and two stations, and some treat them as either one or the other, without exception.

I would appreciate as much information as you can give, including any past TfL (or equivalent) headed documents which confirm that the stations are operationally one but aesthetically two, and why this was decided.

I can advise that the two stations have very different histories, opened at different times by no fewer than four different railway companies. Bank and Monument stations were entirely separate entities until an escalator link connected the two stations for the first time in 1933 and it became an interchange. Today, it is operated as a single station complex thanks to the Northern line platforms, which can be accessed from both Bank and Monument. Additional information on the history of the stations can be found in the attached Research Guide.

As the stations are geographically disparate and are named in relation to other geographically fixed points of interest, serving different lines, the decision was made to keep the separate station identities with clearly marked interchange rings on our maps. The naming and navigation works well for passengers and there would be significant costs involved in changing signs on both stations and indeed across the entire network.

Should you require additional information then I would recommend you contact our Corporate Archives once they reopen via the following link: https://tfl.gov.uk/corporate/about-tfl/culture-and-heritage/corporate-archives

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If this is not the information you are looking for, or if you are unable to access it for any reason, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Please see the attached information sheet for details of your right to appeal as well as information on copyright and what to do if you would like to re-use any of the information we have disclosed.

If this is not the information you are looking for, or if you are unable to access it for any reason, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Please see the attached information sheet for details of your right to appeal as well as information on copyright and what to do if you would like to re-use any of the information we have disclosed.

Yours sincerely

Jasmine Howard
FOI Case Officer
FOI Case Management Team
General Counsel
Transport for London
 

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