Transport for London: Celebrating Women in STEM

We’re celebrating the first female computer scientist in honour of our growing position in the Tech and Data industries. You can get involved by participating in our scavenger hunt and entering our competition. Did you know that Transport for London is a major player not just in transport, but also in many careers that stem (pardon the pun) from Science, Technology, Engineering, and Maths (STEM) backgrounds.

This year, we’re celebrating the T in STEM on Ada Lovelace Day. On 10 October, join in as we celebrate the women behind the scenes in technology. Hosted by the TfL Women in Technology group (a community affiliated with the TfL Women’s Network), it will be a jam-packed day of events, with a scavenger hunt and competition.

Scavenger Hunt clues… Can you find Ada?

The hunt focuses on technology, transport, and the history of trailblazing women around London.

See our clues and start planning your routes. Take photos and share on social media with the hashtags #TfLALDHunt and #FindingAda. Tag our Instagram, Twitter and Facebook pages in your posts, and we will share our favourites!

• Find the blue plaque where Ada Lovelace (1815-1852) lived from 1835.
• Find the blue plaque where Beatrix Potter lived from 1866 to 1913. Although better known for her children’s stories, she was also fascinated by natural science and publicly challenged an established theory on fungi.
• Find a Passenger Information Display on the Victoria line. The Victoria line is a leading train service because trains arrive at each station every 100 seconds, one of the most frequent in the world.
• Find a ‘W’ on the floor by a Tube platform screen door. The ‘W’ is for Westinghouse (the platform screen doors were made by Siemens/Westinghouse).
• Find the famous Houses that stood next to the first traffic signal in the world!
• Find the portrait of Dorothy Hodgkin (1910-94) by Maggi Hambling.  She was a British biochemist who developed protein crystallography, a way of understanding the atomic and molecular structure of crystals and the third woman to win the Nobel Prize for Chemistry.
• Find the memorial to the Chief Engineer who solved the problem of the Great Stink of 1858.
• Find a train that was manufactured by Siemens.
• Find Crossrail hoardings. Crossrail is one of the most diverse projects ever staffed in London with some very senior women engineers. Crossrail Control Centre and signalling are being delivered by Siemens.
• Find the Edith Cavell statue. She was shot in 1915, during World War I, by the German army for helping Allied soldiers escape from Occupied Belgium. Her death was used as a propaganda tool by Britain although she herself said ‘Patriotism is not enough, I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone’.
• Find the Emmeline Pankhurst statue. She was a leader of the Suffragettes who fought for the vote for women, a right not won until 1928. Imprisoned 13 times between 1908 and 1914, She suspended her campaign at the outbreak of World War I, when many women did men’s jobs – hastening votes for women over 30 in 1918.
• Find the building that will feature the ‘Poster Girls’ exhibition.
• Find the Florence Nightingale statue. The statue was sculpted in 1867 by AG Walker, backs onto the Crimean War Memorial. Oddly, she carries an oil lamp, instead of her actual candle lantern. Nurses leave a wreath here every year on May 12 – the anniversary of the death of ‘The Lady With The Lamp’ who transformed military hospitals.
• Find the Louisa Blake memorial. Edwin Lutyens – famed for the Cenotaph – designed the memorial to Dame Louisa Brandreth Aldrich Blake (1865-1925), dean of the London School Of Medicine For Women. She was the first female surgeon in Britain and the first to operate on cancers of the cervix and rectum.
• Find the Margaret Ethel MacDonald statue. The wife of Ramsay MacDonald died in 1911, at their home nearby, just before he became the first Labour Prime Minister. A feminist and socialist, this lively bronze by Richard Goulden (more noted for his war memorials) shows her with nine children because she did a lot of charity work for young people.
• Find a DLR train.
• Find the blue plaque where the pioneer of the study of molecular structures including DNA lived 1951-1958.
• Find the blue plaque where two related campaigners for Women’s Suffrage lived.
• Find a religious building dedicated to Florence Nightingale’s shining light in the place she was offered to be buried. Nightingale is described as a true pioneer in the graphical representation of statistics, and is credited with developing a form of the pie chart now known as the polar area diagram, or occasionally the Nightingale rose diagram.
• Find the blue plaque where the pioneer of Child Psychoanalysis lived 1938-1982.
• Find the statue of Catherine Booth. She was the cofounder of the Salvation Army in 1878. Painfully shy, she nevertheless broke the convention that women did not speak at adult meetings to become a powerful preacher in her own right.
• Find the Virginia Woolf statue. She was a member of the racy Bloomsbury Group of writers and artists who lived in this area of London. Considered one of the leading writers of her generation, she suffered from severe depression and drowned herself after filling her pockets with stones.
• Find the blue plaque where the founder of Girton College Cambridge lived.
• Find the statue of Mary Seacole. This Jamaica-born mixed-race nurse ran a front-line hospital/store during the Crimean War in 1855, Florence Nightingale having refused her help despite Seacole’s experience of tropical disease.
• Find a number 15 bus, in 1974 Jill Viner became the first female bus driver.
• Find the blue plaque where Elizabeth Garrett Anderson lived 1836-1917 – the first woman to qualify as a doctor in Britain.
• Find the blue plaque where pioneering physicist and promoter of women’s rights lived 1903-1923.

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