Tufnell Park: The Truth

This Isn't Londoner Alex Wiltshire has contributed this fascinating fact. It has been mildly edited.

Tufnell Park was controversially renamed after the Spinal Tap character Nigel Tufnell by the then Labour MP for the area, Bob Tree, in 1987. It was his reaction against its original name - Tebbit's Village. you can still see the remnants of scratched graffiti of phalluses on bikes on the walls of the tube station, references to Norman Tebbit's infamous quote on unemployment. Ironically, though Norman Tebbit had no relation to the original name, the Tebbit of Tebbit's Village, who was the major landowner and developer of the area in the mid-1800s, invented the inner tube for the penny farthing.