When the enlarged Whitechapel station opened last year, the Mayor of Tower Hamlets asked for signs to be added in the Bengali language. And now they have been.
Tower Hamlets has the biggest Bangladeshi community in the UK with around a third of residents of Bangladeshi heritage, and Tower Hamlets Council has funded dual language signs in English and Bengali outside and throughout the station. Transport for London (TfL) began installing the signs last week and is expecting them all to be in place by the end of April.
At the moment, there have been additions to the roundel pole outside the station, above the entrance, and just inside the entrance.
John Biggs, Mayor of Tower Hamlets, said: “I am delighted that TfL has listened to our request to recognise the contribution our Bangladeshi community has made to Tower Hamlets and London as a whole.”
The signs have been installed in time for Bangladesh Independence Day on Saturday 26th March.
The Bengali signs at Whitechapel station are not the only bilingual signs on the Elizabeth line, as there’s also signs at Southall written in the Punjabi Gurmukhi script.
Elsewhere, there are unsurprisingly bilingual signs at St Pancras International and Heathrow tube stations, but also at Marylebone in Chinese for Bicester Village, and in Japanese in the tiny village station at Moreton in Marsh, Gloucestershire. Japanese because the tiny station became a popular stopping off point for Japanese tourists visiting the Cotswolds following a big domestic advertising campaign a few years ago.
