It is ELECTION TIME, so I thought it was time for CityMetric to have exciting NEW MAP: the TUBE MAP of MPs!

No, this is not some hilarious satires where I label Chuka Ummana as an interchange between the red line and the yellow line LOL!!! I have instead just drawn dots on the actual tube map to indicate which party currently controls the constituency it’s in – or at least did before parliament was dissolved. Because I wanted to.

Some caveats:

1) To work this out I looked up the postcodes for each station in the parliament website’s “find your constituency” tool (or squinted at maps in cases where the stations have no postcode). Some stations are very close to constituency boundaries so might be considered debatable – if you think I’ve given a station the incorrect affiliation please feel free to details this by writing a letter in green crayon then flushing it down the toilet.

2) Probably the “right” way to represent this data is one coloured dot per station but I enjoyed placing multiple dots to “fill in” the more complicated stations like Euston so I did it anyway? Use blue crayon to complain about this one.

Here’s the map.

Click to expand. Image courtesy of TfL.

Anyway, what does this actually tell us?

Outer London is full of Tories, don’t go there

Apart from South East London – except this is misleading because my map doesn’t include the National Rail stations which form a lot of the transport there so just don’t go there anyway.

This is even starker if you look at it by zone (with the inevitable exception of Zone 1 for fairly obvious reasons).

The Toriest Line is: the Metropolitan Line

And that’s not even counting the stops that are currently “independent” due to David Gauke not being a Tory anymore.

The Labourest Line is: the Emirates Airline?

Sure? With 100 per cent of its two stops in Labour constituencies they should start piping in “Oh, Jeremy Corbyn” over the speakers as you descend towards the Millennium Dome I guess.

Meanwhile in actual transport infrastructure, the DLR has over 95 per cent of its stops in Labour areas.

The Lib Dem-est line is the tram.

It’s on the only line with any Lib Dem stops at all, and even it isn’t veeery Lib Dem – they only “hold” 2 stations.

Cross party stations

The only “linked” stations on the map that cross parties are Tower Hill and Tower Gateway – Tower Hill is Labour, while Tower Gateway, lying just over the border in the Cities of London and Westminster, is Conservative. Why not interview some people walking between one and the other in a futile attempt to divine something?

Anyway isn’t something happening today???

The election could of course rewrite the political tube map entirely! Well, a few bits of it.

In south west London we can see that Yougov’s latest MRP numbers suggest that Richmond Park is going to flip back to the Lib Dems while Putney could swing to Labour

 

Image courtesy of TfL.

As could Chipping Barnet in the north:

Image courtesy of TfL.

 

Here’s the full map according to YouGov predictions:

Click to expand. Image courtesy of TfL.

And here, if you’d really like, is an exciting interactive map where you can compare this with the current situation and that after the last three elections.