I once a group of students (English as a Foreign Language) tell me that they’d been to Liverpool that weekend and were really disappointed because there was nothing about the Beatles there. Further questioning - Liverpool had lots of businesses and only took them half an hour to get to from their base in West London - clarified that it was Liverpool St they went to, the station in London, not the city.
I’ve since had to clarify this with numerous other students planning a Beatles trip, including one group where the teacher leading the trip was astounded at how long it would take to get there and even argued with me about it until I showed her a map.
Other students will say they live near Liverpool, even though somehow they’re getting to class in Holborn (London, not far from Liverpool St) for 9am every day.
They assume, not unreasonably, that the “St” in “Liverpool St” means “station” rather than “Street.”
I expect the same has happened with Oxford St and Leicester Square; I have had students say they’d previously taken EFL classes in Oxford when they really meant Oxford St, but never personally met anyone who went there by accident. Yet. Probably doesn’t happen so much with the DLR station called Cyprus.
I’ve always wondered a bit, at the choice of “Liverpool Street” for the name of the London station for trains to places in East Anglia (the easterly “bulge” of England just north of London). It seems certain that confusion of the kind told of above has been caused by this name, to not-particularly-savvy non-Londoners, for the past 150-plus years. One would think that the original railway promotors might have foreseen this problem, and called their terminal station after some other street which it lay close to; but the doings of Britain’s railways have often been rather lacking in common sense.
It’s because the surrounding area was (and still is, in terms of the land itself) owned by the Earl of Liverpool. Similar for Oxford St, Gloucester Rd etc. Somebody paid for the leasehold on the land that they built the station on and named it after the owner. Sometimes this was just because the owner wanted it, and sometimes it was because the street it was on was already known as Liverpool St because the freeholder, the Earl of Liverpool, had his coat of arms above one of the major inns there so everybody called it by that name anyway.
Inns are one of the major givers of tube and train station names in London (see: Seven Sisters, Angel) because they stood at crossroads and significant points of passage. Sometimes the inns are named after the landowner who originally gave them his patronage to allow them to be an inn. Hence, in a roundabout way, Liverpool St. He owned the land, his inn was named for him, the area was named for his inn.
Ah, right. You can see him twirling his moustaches and fiendishly chortling over all the future clueless travellers wanting to go to the city of Liverpool, who would board trains from the wrong station and get into a total mess…
I used to fly to Tucson, AZ quite often. Occasionally when booking the flight I would accidentally enter “TUC” as the airport code (instead of “TUS”, which is the code for Tucson) and be greeted with a message that “There are no flights available to Tucumán, Argentina from PHL”. Good thing, that prevented me from accidentally booking an overseas flight :D.
On a non-travel note, when the movie “Under the Tuscan Sun” was out there was a poster on the side of a bus stop near work. Whenever I drove past, I would catch sight of the poster in my peripheral vision and read “Under the Tucson Sun” - which can get very hot in the summertime…
I fly to southern California fairly regularly and book it through my company’s travel agent. I am always very rigorous in checking that my flight to Ontario Airport isn’t taking me to Canada by mistake.
I did notice during one of my US trips that you guys have a city (town? I don’t know its size) called Ontario, but it seems to me that there would be no chance for confusing that with the province of Ontario. If you were flying into Ontario Canada you would be flying into one of the cities, e.g. Ottawa, Toronto, etc. and your ticket would reflect that.
2 ladies went to the local county fair in Knoxville thinking they were at the Knoxville 1982 World’s Fair. They discovered their mistake when they asked someone where the China pavilion was.
It’s an extremely expensive area. Mind you, if you already had a souvenir shop nearby (there aren’t any within walking distance of the station because it’s not a very touristy place) then you could probably charge a fortune for your Beatles memorabilia because anyone who was uninformed enough to go to Liverpool St instead of Liverpool probably doesn’t really have a good grasp of exchange rates.
One real-life case I am aware of: last year a group of people I know went on a skiing trip to Austria. 6 of them booked flights to Salzburg. The other two travelled to Strasbourg, France, where they spent four days and didn’t do any skiing.
not exactly the same, but I am reminded of a friend of mine who had no idea there was a difference between Somalis and Samoans. God forbid she ever booked a trip to either place.
On second thought, I am sure Samoa would have been a lovely trip.
I suppose it’s advantageous that Washington, DC has never had a “Pennsylvania Avenue” station leading confused foreign tourists to snoop around the White House looking for the entrance to Hersheypark.
