Bond Street has been renamed – and the internet isn’t happy about it

London Fashion Week is just around the corner (September 15-19), and some brands are pulling out all the stops to make their mark – or tube stops, in some cases.

Bond Street has officially transformed into Burberry Street, as part of the brand’s citywide takeover for one of the most stylish weeks in town. 

The signage features one of Burberry’s new official colours, knight blue, which has been picked out by Chief Creative Officer Daniel Lee.

Sure, TfL takeovers are nothing new. Southgate station was temporarily rebranded as Gareth Southgate station following England’s World Cup campaign in 2018 (we were robbed). It happens informally, too: just this summer, Barbican was jokingly renamed ‘Barbiecan’ to poke fun at the OTT marketing campaign for Greta Gerwig’s record-breaking ‘Barbie’.

This time though, fun has been swapped for frustration, with spectators all saying the same thing: it’s confusing. In campaigns past you were unlikely to lose more than three seconds recalibrating your route. ‘Burberry Street’, however, could quite legitimately be plonked on the Monopoly board. Who knows how many Uniglo bag-donning tourists are currently flailing around the underbelly of the Jubilee line.

One Twitter user, @castlefacts1, said: ‘The idea of signage is to be useful and informative, not some tacky marketing campaign.’

And it’s not just tourists that are baffled. Londoners have been left scratching their heads too.

‘Yes the Burberry takeover of Bond Street is cool but it also had me thinking I’d completely lost my mind on the way home from a 12 hour night shift,’ commented @MadeleineDunne.

But what’s fashion without its critics, eh? 

Here are some of the internet’s best reactions: