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Tube bosses were forced to destroy nearly half a million London Underground maps after they accidentally printed them with a tiny error.

Transport for London noticed the mistake part of the way through the printing process – by which time 474,280 of the maps had been produced carrying the mistake.

The tiny error was in south west London’s bottom left-hand corner of the map where Morden – the last stop on the Northern line – was incorrectly placed in the tram zone rather than zone four.

The gaffe was spotted by London blogger Diamond Geezer at the time.

According to the Mirror, which obtained the numbers through a Freedom of Information Act request, most of the mistakenly-printed maps were the pocket maps which can be printed cheaply at 12 for 1p.

Almost 4,000 of the wrongly printed maps were on posters more than a metre wide, the stats showed.

Altogether all the maps would have cost TfL under £9,000.

In a statement TfL said they identified the error part way through printing in May 2016.

A spokesman added: “These were subsequently recycled (the pocket maps are printed on 100 per cent recycled paper) and through the procurement efficiencies that we have been making, we were able to recover these costs and still produce the required number of Tube maps within our overall print budget.

“No copies of the map (both physical and pocket) were put up in public areas or on trains on the Tube network.

“However a delivery of the pocket maps were sent to Victoria Coach Station and Gatwick Airport, these were then collected.”

Each month the Tube gets through around 1.3 million pocket maps a month across the rail network.