On Mon, 9 May 2011 13:32:18 +0100, Jeremy Double wrote
On 09/05/2011 12:42, Martin L wrote:
To a certain extent, I think that the usual convention may have been
that it depended on whether the station was actually named after a
place (for example, there are actually areas shown on the Ordnance
Survey map, not just stations, called North Acton, South Acton, East
Acton and West Acton), or whether the 'north' or 'central' or whatever
was simply added by the railway company to distinguish it from other
stations. Hence Finchley Central, because there isn't such a place as
Central Finchley, it's just the central station for Finchley; as
opposed to East Finchley, which is called that because there is
actually a place called East Finchley.

That makes a lot of sense... one wouldn't expect stations called Ham
East and Ham West, for instance!

You would if they were in Ham near Richmond-On-Thames :-)