Well, this has taken me bloody ages. I wanted to do something interesting for my first task, go the extra mile and all that, but I never thought it would take this long… my brain has very nearly turned to mush!

This is the first task I have attempted to complete on SFZero, as I saw it as a fantastic way to bring it over the Atlantic, as it were. Being English, I don’t really have access to the BART system and (being from fairly small towns) my experience of public transport has been that of tiny routes and disused buses.

My simple answer to this? Use the London Underground system instead. It’s one of those maps that nearly everyone in Britain can instantly recognize, and looks similar to the sort of map that should’ve been used in this task. Unfortunately, it took me until a while into the map to realize that I had bitten off a touch more than I thought with this – 50 stations down, another 250 to do… With this in mind, I decided to stop working out the anagrams on my own and use an internet anagram engine instead – still picking the best sounding ones, of course, I don’t want to use just any old set of words for a transport system that thousands of people have to use, you know!

My next minor hissy fit with this task came about two hours into rewriting the names of the stations onto the map – after doing about four lines, Laine came into the room and kindly pointed out that my map was missing nearly the entirety of Zones 1 and 2 from it. Therefore, I was about a quarter of the way to finishing the WRONG MAP of London. Back to the drawing board again…

The final piece is shown below. I started work on this one at 4:00 pm Sunday Jan 6th, finished it 5:50 pm Monday January 7th. Not bad, considering I’ve had breaks too!

I have taken a couple of liberties with the stations – not all of them are perfect in their grammar, and certain ones (e.g. Oakwood, Bank, Oval) didn’t want to be anagrammised at all, so I’ve made them sound as much like real words as I can. Also, DLR didn’t exactly make for a fun anagram, so I used the full name instead.

I’m not going to write out all my anagrams in a nice neat little list because I feel that even the most hardcore among you wouldn’t make it past halfway. So instead, here are a few of my personal favourites:

Bethnal Green – NETHER BANGLE
Bounds Green – SURGEON BEND
Bromley-by-Bow – WOBBLY EMBRYO
Brondesbury – BODY BURNERS
Caledonian Road & Barnsbury – A BARARIAN SUDDENLY CROON
Chancery Lane – HENCE CRY ANAL
Charing Cross – CHRONIC GRASS
Dalston Kingsland – KIND GALLANT NODS
Ealing Common – MENACING LOOM
Epping – PIG PEN
Finchley Road & Frognal – FALCON HOLDING A FERRY
Gloucester Road – CORRUGATED SOLE
Golder’s Green – SLENDER GORGE
Goodge Street – GROTTO’S EDGE
Grange Hill – RAGING HELL
Hampstead Heath – THE ASHAMED PATH
Langdon Park – DRAGON PLANK
Leicester Square – TREACLE ESQUIRES
Leyton Midland Road – A DOLT ADMIRED NYLON
London City Airport – TRY IRONCLAD OPTION
Mansion House – HEINOUS MOANS
Mornington Crescent – CONCERNING TORMENTS
Mudchute – DUTCH EMU
New Cross Gate – NEWT CORSAGES
North Greenwich – TRENCHING WHORE
Paddington – DATING POND
Seven Sisters – SENSES STRIVE
Shoreditch – THE ORCHIDS
South Acton – STOUT NACHO
South Ealing – TOUGH ALIENS
Stanmore – A MONSTER!
Sydenham – SHADY MEN
Theydon Bois – SOOTY BEHIND
Tottenham Court Road – DETACH A MUTTON ROTOR
Upminster Bridge – BEDTIME PURRINGS
Totteridge & Whetstone – TOOTS & WHITE DETERGENT
Watford High Street – THWARTED FORESIGHT
Westminster – TRIM WETNESS
Willesden Green – DWELLERS ENGINE

I understand that I could’ve probably cut my time on this task down significantly if I had just found a simple white background for the map, but my damn mind wouldn’t let me cut corners like that. So instead I made sure I’ve kept everything the same colour, matched the colours and the fonts as perfectly as I could, and tried to keep the guidelines on the map as intact as possible. My Photoshop is on the verge of exploding now under the sheer weight of layers on this picture! I’d also like to draw your attention to the fact that every place name has been changed, even the line names and the footnotes about other stations – even if only so that I can vaguely understand why I wasted all that time doing it…

Warning: It's a massive file, so I'm trying to get it sorted to show as a link here. Sadly, I'm a complete newb at this so I don't know what I'm doing. Ah well, I'm sure I'll work it out eventually. In the meantime, I've attached a smaller(?) version, that's only 3000 pixels wide... The bigger one was gonna be put as a poster into an actual London Underground station to confuse people, updates on that as it happens.