“Is this just expensive virtue-signalling?” a reporter asked Sadiq Khan at the event marking the official launch of the new names and colours of the six London Overground lines on Thursday. He was not alone: the capital’s mayor has faced variants of this question from all comers these last few months.
The new names are, let’s say, “socially conscious”. Two of them, Weaver and Windrush, relate to this history of immigration to London; two, Suffragette and Lioness, to rather different forms of feminism, both problematic in their own way (the former because the Suffragettes were, whatever else they were, terrorists; the latter because naming a line after a football team feels faintly silly). Another line, Mildmay, commemorates a hospital important to the LGBTQ community for its vital role in the era of the AIDS pandemic, even though (I may be the only person at all irritated by this) it doesn’t actually go anyhere near it. Only one of the six names – the tiny Liberty Line out in the suburbs of the far east; a reference to a medieval government structure, whose name is also attached to Romford’s main shopping centre – has a name which sounds like a sop to the right.
All of which has left certain people feeling sort-of triggered. When the names were unveiled back in February, Susan Hall – the Tories’ candidate for Khan’s job in last May’s election – described it as a “pointless, costly, virtue signalling project”, through which Khan was “focusing on his own PR”. Just this week, Howard Cox, the anti fuel tax campaigner who won 3% of the vote for Reform, called it a “sick” and “ego driven whim”. Since Khan has not named even one of the new lines after himself it’s not exactly clear how this accusation stands, however. If the purpose of the rebrand really was to drive the right potty, it was £6.3 million well spent.
But this was not the vibe at the launch event at Dalston Junction on Thursday morning. People held up signs showing the lines’ new names on a background made up of their colours; professional transport nerds bustled for space with Transport for London staff, who looked as excited as any of them. Standing amid a line of representatives of Londons’ Caribbean community (sauce entrepreneur Levi Roots, who said he was “inspired”; singer Mica Paris, who described it as “a really powerful day”), the mayor declared “Windrush” as his favourite name. This was, under the circumstances, convenient.
Then he led the room in a countdown from 10, before pulling the cord to open some curtains, behind which was a colourful, specially made roundel. “How to spend £6.3m in 10 seconds,” the Evening Standard’s Ross Lydall tweeted. Other newspapers were more annoyed that the mayor had hugged Mick Whelan, the head of the train drivers’ union.
In fact, there are pretty strong arguments that this expensive, virtue-signalling waste of time isn’t any of those things. Firstly, the £6.3m spent on new branding, maps and signage may be a lot to the likes of you or I. But it’s peanuts to TfL – little more than half of 0.1% of its £9.7bn current annual budget. By making the Overground as easily navigable as the Underground – by making it possible to tell at a glance whether a problem is something that’ll affect your commute, or something happening 20 miles away – it should actually, the transport authority argues, boost journey numbers and fare revenue, and more than pay for itself. This is exactly why some of those professional transport nerds – hi – have been calling for just this sort of change for years now.
As to “virtue signalling”, it’s certainly been understood as such by the sorts of people who get angry about such things. But, Khan told that reporter, he’d heard no such complaints about the name of the tube lines “or the Elizabeth line”. London’s last three named lines – Victoria, Jubilee, Elizabeth – were all named for the royal family. This, too, could be understood as an attempt of signalling.
It struck me, watching the good-natured if slightly silly unveiling ceremony on Thursday, that Transport for London is, for good and ill, a similar sort of institution to the BBC. It has a unique, occasionally absurd internal culture. It’s staffed by people who are not only enthusiastic about its work, but are actively fans of a lot of it. And it believes that a core part of its mission is to represent everyone in the polity it serves. “Every journey matters,” TfL’s slogan runs. Whatever your views on the Overground rebrand, the choice of names is clearly meant to suggest that every Londoner matters, too.
Just as with the BBC, though, this leaves it open to criticism from those who don’t believe any of this should be the business of state-backed bodies. The main thing TfL has done with its new names is to highlight the contribution to London’s life made by people who are not the Queen of England. Anyone who sees this as virtue signalling may, in fact, be signalling rather more about themselves.
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