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Weaver, Windrush, Suffragette, Mildmay, Lioness and Liberty. You’ll recognise these as the new names of the Overground lines. But what if we told you there could have been an alternative future, where the Overground lines didn’t sound like Power Rangers, but instead had quite bog-standard names, like the ‘East London line’?
Back in 2015, when Boris Johnson was the Mayor of London, there was a project to rename the Overground that never quite came to fruition. At the time, the City of London spent £10,175 on customer research for the proposed line name changes which never came true.
According to TfL documents revealed by a Freedom of Information request, if we’d used BoJo’s big rebrand the Overground lines would have been very different. Want to know what they were? Here’s the full list.
What the Overground lines could have been called
- Lioness – Watford local line
- Mildmay – North London line
- Suffragette – Barking line
- Weaver – Lea Valley line
- Windrush – East London line
- Liberty – Emerson Park line
Alternatives to the Lea Valley line (Weaver) included the Hackney line, Jazz line, William Morris line, River Lea line and Southbury line. What do you think of the alternative Overground line names?
Learning more about the new(ish) Overground line branding with Time Out
The process of renaming and recolouring London’s orange Overground network began last November. Here’s more info on the new line name meanings, what the tube looks like with all the new colours and how much the rebrand cost. Plus, here’s the history of the Suffragette line (AKA, the ‘Goblin’).
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