Thursday 11 October 2012

"Confused tourists looking for Cyprus turn up two thousand miles away in East London"

From The Daily Mail:

• Tourists keep on visiting the new DLR station with the same name

• Locals frustrated at having to keep on telling them where the real Mediterranean island is

Confused tourists are visiting a docklands light railway station called Cyprus after mistaking it for the site of the famous German paratrooper landings in 1941.

Baffled holiday-makers turn up at the station - opened in 1994 - and wander around looking for the beach or the UN peacekeepers who have patrolled the Buffer Zone since 1974. They have "no idea" they are actually near Beckton in the east end of London - more than two thousand miles away from the site of the more famous divided island at the east end of the Mediterranean.

Tourists are turning up every month and asking locals where the beach is - only to be told to get back on the train and head across the capital to Heathrow or Gatwick airports.

The situation has become so bad that business owners in Nikosia and Famagusta are calling on Transport for London bosses to change the name of the east London DLR station to put an end to the confusion.

Dmitri Ioannou, the boss of The Beatles coffee shop in Limassol, said: "Cyprus is one of the most iconic holiday desinations in the world, so people at Transport for London must have known this was going to happen.

"You wouldn’t name a station Buckingham Palace unless it was outside Buckingham Palace and this is costing us business. I think they should change the name of the station," he told Cyprus Today.

13 comments:

Macheath said...

Surely you have forgotten the obligatory final line comparing house prices in the two locations.

Mark Wadsworth said...

McH, no, the house price is only relevant when reporting crimes, e.g. "89-year old widow left strangled in pretty £350,000 cottage", "Body of former Miss UK found decomposing in garden of £1 million Surrey villa" etc etc.

Macheath said...

Maybe the DM is developing some kind of compulsive valuation disorder. The last line of your source article runs thus:

'The average house price in the West Ham area is around £240,000, compared to around £1m in post St John’s Wood.'[sic]

Mark Wadsworth said...

McH, "Compulsive Valuation Disorder", I like.

But you are reading the wrong article. It actually ended "Holiday homes in Cyprus have slumped by up to 50% in value following the Euro-crisis. Values in Turkish-controlled Northern Cyprus have been hit following recent court cases in which planning permission was retrospectively withdrawn."

Macheath said...

Ah yes, of course; I stand corrected - efkharisto!

AndrewWS said...

Snort.

Simply wrong area of London.

In the days when I lived up the line at Manor Park, 'Cyprus' would have been an appropriate name for Finsbury Park tube station. I gather the area's now full of Turks.

AndrewWS said...

BTW, a friend of mine once found a very foreign young woman sobbing her heart out on Cambridge Heath station because she couldn't find the University and nobody she had asked had heard of it. No dreaming spires there!

Mark Wadsworth said...

AWS, did the poor cow show up a few months later at Oxford Street?

Old BE said...

I love the comment from TfL about "in-depth" research. Srsly? What tourist guide says "go to Abbey Road station"???

BE

Robin Smith said...

While cycling up in the Henley chilterns recently, passing South End a quaint little 3 x £1,000,000 home village, some lads in a car stopped me and asked how to get to the pier. No joke. They were using a TomTom

Bayard said...

Both Gillingham in Kent and Gillingham in Dorset get their fair share of passengers arriving at the railway station thinking they åre at the other one.

Derek said...

Worst case of this I heard was the case of the Italian tourists who booked a holiday package to Sydney. They ended up in Sydney alright. Sydney, Nova Scotia. Now there's nothing wrong with Nova Scotia as a holiday destination, In fact I would recommend it. But Sydney isn't exactly the most picturesque part of NS. And definitely no Opera House.

john b said...

It's only a six-hour drive to Lunenburg, which I'm told has a lovely opera house.