London's Overground: a 'woke' rebrand?

If you hear Sadiq Khan intone that "this is a hugely exciting moment", you can be sure that the London Mayor has just announced some "stupid" thing that will annoy most of the capital's residents and many of the rest of us too, said Rod Liddle in The Sunday Times.

And so it was last week, when Khan unveiled his £6.3 million rebranding of the Overground network. Its six train lines appear in orange on the Underground map, but now they'll get their own colours and their own names – a virtue-signalling "hotchpotch" including Suffragette (after the sometimes violent campaign led by women in east London), Windrush (for a line serving areas with large Afro-Caribbean populations) and Mildmay (after a hospital where a lot of Aids patients were treated 35 years ago).

'A woman one, a black one, an LGBTQ+ one'

It all sounds quite confusing for visitors to the city: it would surely have been simpler to name the lines after the places the trains go to. But what distresses me, said Liddle, is the lack of one in honour of Mary Seacole. A decade ago, every new hospital, school and street was being named after her. What can she have done to offend the progressive Left?

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They say there was a consultation, said Janice Turner in The Times, but it seems what actually happened was that a committee "ingested a diversity, equity and inclusion manual and burped [the names] up". We can imagine the brainstorming. "We need a woman one, a black one, an LGBTQ+ one." Jews? "Better not." But we can have a Weavers line to celebrate centuries of immigration to the East End, and "if the Free Palestine lot kick off, just say we meant the Huguenots".

Admittedly, naming things is always fraught; even our late Queen must have felt the Elizabeth line was one nod for her too many. But this divisive exercise in "tick-box diversity" is just typical of Khan, who has had so few ideas for London beyond rainbow pedestrian crossings and hashtag activism.

'The anti-woke brigade is worrying too much'

I can't see these cringey names being widely adopted, said Paul Clements in The Independent. The rebrand feels like a wasted opportunity. The Gospel Oak to Barking line is jokily known as the Goblin line; how much more fun to have formalised that, instead of turning it into the worthy Suffragette line.

On the other hand, Windrush is a lovely word and speaks to this nation's history just as much as Waterloo or Victoria, said Isabel Hardman in The Spectator. And lots of things are named after forgotten male heroes, so does it matter if the Lioness line (through Wembley) outlives the memory of the Lionesses' Euros victory? Maybe the anti-woke brigade is worrying too much about this.