Sadiq Khan has announced six new names for the previously boringly-named Overground. The practical point of it is that the Overground goes everywhere and is quite confusing to navigate if you’re an occasional visitor. Breaking up the orange (which only stayed that way because Boris Johnson liked it being the same colour when he was shown a draft map) isn’t particularly disputed, but what has excited interest is the choice of names. Lioness, Mildmay, Windrush, Weaver, Suffragette and Liberty have a certain progressive ring to them. They’ve been received in some quarters as names that are seeking a reaction rather than just reflecting London’s heritage.
Interestingly, Khan isn’t the only politician who has been after a ‘woke’ update to the tube map: when Rory Stewart was running for Mayor of London in 2020, his team drew up a list of new Overground line names, including Seacole, Pankhurst, Brunel and Churchill. That last would also have provoked a reaction from a different noisy group in politics.
We like to create a sense of place by naming lines, streets and areas after our history, and famous figures or moments are often much more appropriate than the names you find in housing developments: ‘Primrose Avenue’ or ‘Beech Road’ always sound so hollow when those plants have had to make way for some identikit homes with artificial grass in the back garden. The Lioness line goes through Wembley, and while the Lionesses haven’t yet won a World Cup, they have won the Euros, which is a darn sight more recent than the men’s team, so why not? We have plenty of places named after famous sportsmen, and that’s as it should be, but the Lionesses will be no more or less forgotten in the public consciousness than, say, Marcus Trescothick, who has two roads named after him in the Bristol area. Is it really all that ‘woke’ to have a football line, or is it only ‘woke’ when it involves women who’ve achieved a great deal?
Some of the names do smack of trying too hard
Windrush similarly has as much of a place in our sense of self as a nation as Waterloo, or Queen Victoria. There are roads named after Windrush, often in the towns where the Windrush generation came to live and contribute to the Mother Country. It also happens to be a beautiful name that lends itself well to a train line, unlike say, Suffragette, which will sound terribly awkward if you’re stuck on it. ‘Suffragette’ has had a number of goes at getting on the map, including back in 2012 when MPs were considering what new name to give to St Stephen’s Tower. A group of Labour MPs including Paul Flynn and Jeremy Corbyn tabled an early-day motion calling for it to be called ‘Chartist Tower, Suffrage Tower or Big Benn’. That last suggested the group, who never got more than seven MPs signed up to their campaign, were not being entirely serious, but either way the tower ended up becoming the Elizabeth Tower.
New names are always fraught with difficulty, especially when the political authority choosing them is trying to send a message. When I lived in High Wycombe, we had our fair share of Windrush roads, to reflect the make-up of the community in the Buckinghamshire town. But there was at one point an hilarious attempt to rename a road of nail bars and kebab shops the ‘cultural quarter’, which wasn’t so much sending a message as it was forcing an identity on an area which didn’t fit any more than me calling myself a Lioness would.
Some of the names do smack of trying too hard. But there is still a possibility that the ‘this-is-woke’ brigade are reading a little too much into this: I’m not sure that weavers are necessarily that provocative a bunch, with the line between Liverpool Street and Chingford getting that name to reflect the textile history of the area. Textile artists can be pretty radical, but not necessarily in a ‘woke’ way, as Jess de Wahls found when the Royal Academy temporarily stopped stocking her work after a handful of people complained that she was transphobic for believing that biological sex was real and for stitching depictions of uteruses. Perhaps the Equality And Diversity Initiative Line would have been more provocative than the actual choice of Liberty. Similarly, given Liz Truss named one of her kids Liberty, she’d be as likely to be riding that newly-named line between Romford and Upminster, possibly providing some busking entertainment in the form of listing everyone who got in the way of her mission to save the West.
Speaking of getting in the way, the greatest travesty of this update is that it doesn’t take into account the fact that the Circle Line has not been that shape since 2009 and is in fact a very slowly-chugging spiral out to Hammersmith. Perhaps that’s the next mission for Khan, who enjoys provoking a reaction as much as those getting steamy about today’s names enjoy supplying it. Suggestions on a postcard please.
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