One of the things that makes London’s transport network so special – along with the world’s oldest underground railway, and the invention of the non-geographic metro map – is its use of language. A lot of transit systems rely on district names and street addresses when naming stations; almost all label routes with numbers, letters or colours. London, though, has Swiss Cottage and Elephant & Castle stations, the Jubilee and Bakerloo lines. It gives the network personality.
It always felt a bit alien, then, that an increasingly important chunk of the city’s transport system didn’t bother with any of this. The London Overground, launched in 2007 as a brand for former national rail routes, serves many parts of the capital neglected by the tube. Its half a dozen routes, though, have so far been shown on the map in a uniform orange, and are officially described in such thrilling terms as “the Watford line” or “the Stratford to Richmond/Clapham Junction route”.
This is not just antithetical to London’s whole approach to these things, it’s also a pain in the arse. If I ask a route-planning app to get me from the part of the East End where I live to the part of north London where I often work, it is likely to suggest two routes involving three Overground lines. I immediately know which routes it’s suggesting, because I am the sort of nerd who writes things like this, and frankly don’t need the routeing app at all, but most normal people would just see a baffling profusion of orange.
Giving the Overground tube-style line identities, then, so that each route has its own name and colour, has been on the table for some time, and by 2021 had made it as far as Sadiq Khan’s manifesto. And now, with another mayoral election less than three months off, the proposed names are finally here. Well, what do you know?
Making the network easier to navigate is the obvious purpose of the new names, but some of Britain’s saner newspapers think that they’ve discerned another. “Fury as Sadiq Khan splurges £6million of taxpayers’ money changing Overground to ‘virtue signalling’ names like ‘Suffragette’ and ‘Lioness’,” screamed the Mail with all the thoughtfulness we’ve come to expect from a rightwing newspaper considering the actions of a popular Muslim Labour mayor. “Outraged Tories slam ‘money-wasting’ vanity project that panders to leftie liberals in an election year,” continued its extended headline.
The first part of this criticism is nonsense: £6m is nothing, less than 0.01% of the amount national government has so far spent on managing to not build HS2. As to politicians making spending choices designed to shore them up in an election year, I’m sure Jeremy Hunt will take a moment away from working out what else he can defund to pay for tax cuts to be appalled by the very thought.
When furious Tories suggest the names were designed to annoy people like them, though, one suspects they have a point. Windrush (Highbury & Islington to various points in south London) and Suffragette (Gospel Oak to Barking Riverside) were explicitly chosen to big up multiculturalism and feminism respectively (the fact the suffragettes were seen, in their time, as terrorists has been pleasingly airbrushed from history). Weaver, for the Lea Valley routes out of Liverpool Street – a reference to the cloth industry, plus presumably the fact they pass a park named Weavers Fields – too is a reference to the waves of immigrant communities that have passed through the East End.
Meanwhile, Mildmay (Stratford to Richmond/Clapham Junction) is a reference to a charitable hospital in Shoreditch important to the LGBT community because of its “pivotal role in the HIV/Aids crisis”: this one does annoy me, if only because the line doesn’t actually go to Shoreditch, though it does pass Mildmay Park, from which the hospital’s founders took the name. The Lioness line (Euston to Watford Junction) was named after the England women’s football team that won the 2022 Euros on the grounds that the line passes Wembley. And while that does feel a fleeting and faintly cringe thing to commemorate, it’s no more so than, say, the late Queen’s silver jubilee.
Only Liberty, for the tiny Romford to Upminster shuttle, a reference to the medieval Royal Liberty of Havering, which covered much of the area, feels like an attempt to throw a bone to the political right. TfL’s claim that it chose the name because of the historical independence of the people of Havering feels like an obvious attempt to suck up to a borough that doesn’t much like being in London anyway.
So yes, most of these names do feel designed to give the Tories an aneurysm. But why should they? Why should mere reference to the fact London contains black people or women count as political? The last three times London needed to name tube lines, after all, it named them after the royal family – hardly an apolitical choice, and one that involved opting for Victoria over the obviously superior Viking line. Naming things for the people who actually live in this city must surely count as an improvement.
We’ll all get used to the names soon enough, and they will seem no more remarkable than Elizabeth for what had once been Crossrail, or Northern for the line that runs farthest south. In the meantime, anyone who has a problem with naming something Windrush should be forced to explain why. Really, I’d love to hear their answer.
Jonn Elledge is a journalist and author
• This article was amended on 16 February 2024. An earlier version said that £6m represented 0.1% of the cost so far of HS2; this has been changed to 0.01%.
