The full list of names considered for the London Overground’s six lines as part of last year’s £6.3m re-branding process has been revealed.
It comes after mayor Sir Sadiq Khan announced in 2024 that the network’s services would be re-named the Liberty, Lioness, Mildmay, Suffragette, Weaver, and Windrush lines - in a bid to make the Overground easier to navigate.
A document sourced by the London Centric news website through a Freedom of Information request includes 27 previously unseen names which progressed to a scoping out stage, essentially forming a longlist of line titles. A further 51 names which did not reach that stage but were also considered as part of the process, were also disclosed in the document.
The promise to give individual names to each of the Overground’s six lines was made in Sir Sadiq’s 2021 re-election manifesto, telling Londoners that the “network has grown considerably over recent years, and to reflect this I’ll launch a programme to name individual routes, giving each its own identity”.
The programme ended up costing a total of £6.3m, and included an “independent engagement” process which saw local communities and historians asked to provide ideas and feedback on possible names.
The six chosen names were announced in February 2024, but were only formally launched in November, following Sir Sadiq’s re-election in May.
The 27 rejected names which appear to have made the ‘longlist’ are accompanied by a set of in-house descriptions provided by TfL. According to London Centric, the document did not make clear which names applied to which lines, though for some, a geographical connection is obvious.
TfL said that some of the names were rejected because a decision was taken to celebrate groups rather than individuals, some because they were hard to hear clearly on announcements or could have been mistaken for safety-critical words, and some because there was a risk of the names being abbreviated or used as slurs.
The longlist reads as follows:
London Centric has previously reported that Sir Sadiq was initially presented with a shortlist of six names, of which he embraced three but asked TfL to “review the other half of the names and come back with more options”. TfL has not clarified what those three rejected names were.
The 51 names which did not reach the scoping out phase were:
Alms, Anionwu, Appleton, April, Baldock, Banba, Beacon, Beam, Bower, Bridgetower, Chartist, Chronometer, Coleridge, Colossus, Constantine, Desai, Disco, Eakes, Fairkytes, Garden, Grunwick, Harlequin, Havering, Hilltop, Ingrebourne, Lisicki, Lovett, Maroons, Marson, Matchgirls, Maughan, Maurice, Nebulae, Odeje, Pell, Pendulum, Phoenix, Pilot, Ponds, Push and Pull, Ring, Rominster, Ruby, Seacole, Sound, Tagore, Tipping, Tull, Wilde, Willowbrook, Windmill.
