City of Women London

City of Women is a project to rename TfL tube stops after significant women and non-binary people.

City of Women is a project to rename TfL tube stops after significant women and non-binary people, led by Emma Watson, Reni Eddo-Lodge, and Rebecca Solnit, in partnership with Haymarket Books, TfL, CASA and the WOW Foundation.

The project emerged to challenge the tendency for women and non-binary people to be erased from urban histories through the convention of naming city streets and stations after powerful, white men. The first iteration of City of Women took place in New York, led by Solnit and geographer Joshua Jelly-Schapiro, and used the subway map to highlight the city’s remarkable female figures.

Using the Memory Map Toolkit, open source software developed by researchers at CASA, this project delivered the interactive digital City of Women London map to enable the public to explore multimedia archival and narrative histories of London’s significant women. In partnership with UCL Culture, the team developed the interactive site and wrote short bioigraphies for each of the 274 women and non-binary people selected by the project leads for inclusion on the City of Women London print map. Building on the CASA expertise in mapping and storytelling, the research team provided valuable historical and narrative context to the overarching project.

Following the launch of the interactive map on International Women’s Day 2022, the research team is engaging with the Mulberry School to deliver a series of workshops for girls and facilitate interviews with some of the living women whose names appear on the map. Once completed, the intergenerational conversations will be featured as audible content on the City of Women London site.