It doesn't have it yet because Emirates' sponsorship still has two months left to run. But when their ten year deal runs out on 29th June 2022, a nominal rebranding is required.
The original intention was that a new sponsorwould be found and the cablecar would be renamed after them - officially the <Sponsor's Name> Cable Car. Unfortunately nobody was interested. Even the offer of a one year deal (your name here, your choice of colour, see you on the tube map) failed to attract a single interested partner, which was unfortunate given TfL's current financial situation.
And so an unbranded name is needed to fill in the gap between the end of the Emirates era and the dawn of a new deal, should that ever happen.
That new name hasn't yet been announced because we haven't reached the appointed day in the TfL Press Office Publicity Calendar. But it's already out there in the wild if you know where to look, because it's not the only TfL service being imminently renamed.
A lot of enamel route diagrams need updating before Crossrail begins, which means adding little purple stickers labelled 'Elizabeth line' alongside interchange stations. This is currently happening all over the network in readiness for the new railway finally opening to passengers next month. And while you're adding stickers for Crossrail it makes sense to add stickers for the cablecar too, because why send someone out twice?
Nothing's changed at Royal Victoria, the DLR station closest to the northern terminal, which remains as resolutely Emirates-branded as ever. Nothing's changed at Custom House either because that's the actual interchange so doesn't need a sticker. But at every DLR station beyond that - i.e. Prince Regent to Beckton - the route diagrams on the platforms and concourses now have stickers for Crossrail and the cablecar... and here the new name is revealed.
It's not an especially exciting name, but it'll do.
Yes, from 29th June London's cablecar will be known as the London Cable Car.
Arguably that's what it should have been called in the first place rather than a gimmicky title dreamt up by a marketing department. Emirates Air Line was always a bit too forced, a bit too clever, and despite a £36m sponsorship deal never quite took off. It suffered from not obviously being the name of a cablecar, and from being almost indistinguishable from the parent company's aviation business, so if anyone ever used the name it often wasn't clear what they meant.
In fact I'd argue that the Emirates Air Line brand was so poor and so ambiguous that it allowed an alternative to slip through and become better known. That'd be Dangleway, the name I suggested as a laugh in 2011 and which is currently the seventh word (emboldened) in the cablecar's Wikipedia entry. Dangleway raises a smile and has some character, is uniquely associated with this river crossing and if you use it in conversation people generally know what you mean. I fear that was £36m wasted, folks.
London Cable Car is much better, indeed if they'd called it that in 2012 my alternative name might never have broken through. But it's still a bit bland, a bit generic, what with London only having one cablecar and this being it. It's the sort of name that smacks of trying to engage an international tourist rather than appealing to a home audience or sparking the imagination. And you're going to be seeing a lot of it.
It'll appear on the tube map and on status boards and in apps, not to mention marketing collateral, signs on platforms and excitable press releases. Promotional vinyls smothering stations like Tower Gateway will need to be replaced, the 'Things to do on the Jubilee line' wall at Waterloo will need updating and TikTok users getting excited by an aerial sunset will need to use a different hashtag. The two terminals will need different names too, presumably Greenwich Peninsula and Royal Docks with the 'Emirates' prefix missing, and about time too. As someone who's long despised the use of naming rights because it forcibly cheapens and blurs reality, this is a very welcome retreat.
It may not last. A new sponsor may eventually turn up, keen to place their name in front of millions, and then we'd have to go through this entire rebranding exercise for a second time. But that'd then be the third name the cablecar's had, which might start to get confusing, so this unbranding probably makes an eventual rebranding less likely.
It'd be great if the new name was officially Dangleway, oh how we'd laugh, but that was obviously never going to happen. Instead the London Cable Car takes off in two months' time, I suspect to general indifference given that most Londoners who fancied a £5 ride have already been.
And remember, sometimes you don't have to wait for the official announcement to confirm what's happening, sometimes all you have to do is journey to the end of the line and the answer's in plain sight.
