Sorry, Sadiq Khan – I won’t be calling it the ‘Lioness line’

Windrush, Mildmay, Liberty… as the mayor’s daffy new names for London Overground routes are rolled out, Paul Clements says the suburban rail network needed an overhaul, but not this £6m, right-on rebrand

The tangled mess of suburban train lines that make up the London Overground network was unrolled a little this morning – to a collective eye-roll from nonplussed London commuters.

To untangle the mass of orange that has long messed up Harry Beck’s world-famous route map, each of the six lines has been allotted an individual new colour – and, more controversially, an official name that “celebrates the best of London”.

When those names were first announced – ping! – on social media, the collective cringe in my carriage could have been felt in Watford, whose train link into the capital is henceforth coloured yellow and known as the Lioness line.

The line between Gospel Oak and Barking – which has long been known colloquially as the “Goblin” (geddit?) – is now officially the Suffragette line, according to the fun sponges in charge at Transport for London.

The tiny, three-station line in east London, between Romford and Upminster, is now the Liberty line – presumably as in “you can’t make me go there”.

I suspect the connections between the fleshpots of Dalston and Shoreditch in the north to south London idylls such as Clapham and Croydon will remain known to the hipsters who use them as the Ginger line, rather than “The Windrush”. Why? These trains don’t go anywhere near Tilbury Docks, where the first British Caribbeans landed in 1948.

For me, it is as if Ken Livingstone is back at City Hall. It’s all so GLC-tastic, a flashback to a more patrician time when Del Boy and Rodney Trotter were housed by a loony left-wing council on the 12th floor of Nelson Mandela House. (If Only Fools and Horses were filmed today, the block would be renamed in honour of Camila Batmanghelidjh.)

This is Sadiq Khan’s brainchild – and if it all feels like virtue-signalling or another salvo in the culture war, that’s probably because it is. You might feasibly ask a passing commuter for help on getting to the “light blue” or “mint green” line, but no one is ever going to use these new right-on names. All is PC gloss.

Khan has form on this front. When he moved City Hall out of the Glass Testicle – the Norman Foster-designed, purpose-built landmark next to the Tower of London – to a smoked-glass block somewhere out east in zone three, he approved changing its official address to “Kamal Chunchie Way”, in honour of the Sri Lankan race campaigner.

I’m all for bigging-up great London things, but these new train line names don’t just feel like a missed opportunity – they feel like £6m badly spent. They could have referenced nearby forgotten rivers or, through gritted teeth, famous historic locals. And what has been overlooked in all this is the Tube’s glorious and eminently utilitarian tradition for turning two stations into a fun portmanteau for a whole line.

The Bakerloo opened in 1906 as the Baker Street and Waterloo line before eventually being squished together. Before the Victoria line opened in 1968, there was a push to call it the Viking line, a mash-up of Victoria and King’s Cross. Thameslink, the commuter train that connects Bedford and St Pancras, could have been the “BedPan”.

If, as has been suggested, Sadiq Khan does not seek a fourth successive term as mayor of London, his rebranding of the London Overground – along with a soon-to-open £2bn road tunnel in east London, which environmental campaigners say will increase carbon emissions and worsen air quality – will be his legacy. Which, like the train line names, isn’t memorable at all.