Underground, Overground…
Things that the everyday folks left behind…
Culture Morsel readers from outside the UK will be familiar with London’s metro system, colloquially referred to as the tube or more formally, the Underground. What’s less well known is that London also has an Overground: a network of six lines cleverly and pragmatically cobbled together with minimum investment out of existing disused lines. These now deliver between them 150 million passenger journeys a year. The Overground has been a spectacular success of urban infrastucture development.
Whilst the various Underground lines have always each sported distinctive colours, names and identities, the Overground lines have appeared on the London transport map as a rather apologetic, homogeneous ginger tangle. Until today that is, when names for each of the 6 were unveiled.
Where the Underground line names are mostly either prosaic topographical descriptors (Central, Circle, Northern) or references to the British royal family, the new Overground names speak proudly of communities and their contributions to this great metropolis. They’re all evocative, imaginative and bold. The Windrush Line, which runs through boroughs with strong Afro-Caribbean populations honours an entire generation who were asked, in the aftermath of World War II, to come and help a Britain suffering catastrophic labour shortages. The Suffragette Line celebrates the early 20th Century women who fought for the female franchise. The Weaver salutes the immigrant groups, from French Huguenot to Jewish to Bangladeshi among others who built the garment industries of East and North London. Each name has its own profound and important story to tell and a connection with its route.
The choice to name not for defunct monarchs or battles but after human communities and their heroic odysseys is, in this tiresome age, red rag to a certain kind of bull. Some are loudly blowing off that the new naming scheme is ‘virtue signalling’ or ‘wokery.’
But like it or not, these names will embed London’s human history in its shared everyday vocabulary. How very refreshing.