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It handles up to 4 million passenger journeys per day, but how many people actually stop to look at the walls of the London Underground platforms they stand on every morning?

If you can’t easily call to mind the tiling of your local Tube station, you might want to spare a minute to take a look on your next commute, as there may be more to its design than you think.

Mental Floss has, in fact, discovered that some of the oldest and most popular stations on the network have their own unique, subtle and abstract patterns found nowhere else on the network.

The reason for this, it says, is because the designs were originally created to help commuters recognise the station they had arrived at without the benefit of the blue and white signs commuters are used to seeing on a daily basis.

According to Mental Floss, the need for contrasting tiles was not because the signs weren't available, but because, "when the stations were first tiled, many of the passengers would have been illiterate.”

Curious to see what you may not have noticed? Click through the gallery above to discover London’s hidden tiling designs.

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