A BOOK about the names of Tube stations has shone a light on the history of east London and Essex.

From Henry VIII’s romantic hideaway to a very unusual Jack the Ripper suspect, David Revill’s book London by Tube: A History of Underground Station Names sparkles with fascinating facts that grab your attention.

A flick through the pages reveals the Woodford, Leyton and Buckhurst Hill few of us know, and Revill entertains his readers by revealing their secret pasts.

Barkingside Underground Station opened in 1903 and ferried the area’s most famous resident, Thomas Barnardo, in his coffin to the crematorium after he died.

The doctor, who opened two schools in 1867 for impoverished and orphaned girls and boys who had lost their families to a cholera outbreak, was a local hero by the time of his death in 1905, having supported 8,500 children in 96 homes.

But his passion for helping children almost landed him in very hot water: his regular late-night ventures into the East End for homeless children led police to peg him as a suspect for the Jack the Ripper murders.

The construction of nearby Woodford station in 1856 changed the face of the area.

The rural locale was just a collection of hamlets and a Tudor period hunting ground until the railway came along, bringing with it mansions and villas erected for wealthy city workers.

The station spurred further urbanisation when the housing boom arrived, seeing 1,500 houses built each year. The ancient hamlets were lost, buried beneath suburban London.

Buckhurst Hill also played host to Tudor hunters, none more famous than King Henry VIII.

He visited Poteles, a hunting lodge, many times with Anne Boleyn as his wife, and their trips are commemorated today with the road Kings Avenue.

But it is Leyton which can boast the oldest history.

Mankind’s earliest, most primitive stone tools were found in the gravel terraces of the River Lea, dating back to the Paleolithic prehistoric period many thousands of years ago.

And the underground station was built in 1856 just north of the Temple Mills, a group of water mills owned by the Knights Templar since the 13th century.

Its neighbour, Leytonstone, was used as an aircraft components factory in World War Two as well as an air raid shelter.

One night in the Blitz in 1944, German bombs caused mayhem and destruction when they fell on the station but miraculously nobody was killed.