Sep 2006: The Mayor announced yesterday that he's found a cunning way of extending the tube network without forking out billions on new tunnels. He's taking a couple of existing rail services - namely Silverlink's North London line and TfL's East London line - and plans to link the two together by adding in a short stretch of relatively cheap connecting track in the Dalston area. Throw in some new trains and some revamped stations and, hey presto, you have a brand new rebranded railway. Starting in November next year. And it's to be called the "London Overground".
Oct 2007: Wham, a big tangerine octopus has suddenly grabbed hold of the old tube network. The North London line may have been on the tube map for years but now it's bright orange and unmissable. The Gospel Oak to Barking line appears for the first time although with no indication of how infrequent the service is. The Watford to Euston line reappears while the West London line is brand new, ending south of the river at a rather forlorn looking Clapham Junction. All four lines have been inelegantly embedded onto the map with rather too many bends and several over-long stretches. All in all, not lovely.
May 2010: Suddenly southeast London sort-of exists. This is the first time that the tube map has ever ventured into Bromley or Croydon, and the first time it's ever nudged further south than Morden. That's got to be a good thing. There are nine fresh stations altogether from Brockley all the way down to Crystal Palace and West Croydon. None of these stations is actually new of course, they've merely been swallowed up by a different rail line. But the Overground, like the DLR, is given special dispensation to appear on the "tube map" even though it's not part of the tube network.
Dec 2012: It's been dubbed the M25 of rail, somewhat over-grandly, as it doesn't even nudge as far as the North Circular. But the Overground's southern extension does make possible an orbit of the capital, via only two trains, interchanging at Highbury & Islington and Clapham Junction.
May 2015: The current London Overground comes in five orange flavours, but on 31st May we get two more, namely the old West Anglia lines out of Liverpool Street and the Emerson Park shuttle. And then it'll start to get really confusing working out precisely which Overground is which.
Tube line diagrams are going to say 'Overground' everywhere but without making it in any way obvious which branch of the Overground it is. At the northern end of the Victoria line, for example, only one of the four orange interchanges leads to Stoke Newington, but your average Londoner isn't going to know which is which. Then there's the new Extra Complicated Tube Map, which'll have more orange lines than a plate of cheesy spaghetti, and no colour-based distinction as to which line goes where. The line diagrams in the new Overground timetables will also suddenly get a whole lot more complicated.
Once there are half a dozen separate Overground lines you'll be seeing their official names more often. And their official names are unexpectedly long. The new West Anglia acquisition, for example, goes by the overloaded moniker of Liverpool Street - Enfield Town/Cheshunt/Chingford, which is hardly catchy. Meanwhile the former East London line assumes the mouthful that is Highbury & Islington - West Croydon/Clapham Junction. Why don't we go back to calling Richmond/Clapham Junction - Stratford the North London Line? And why don't we call Gospel Oak - Barking the Goblin, for heavens sake, it's well established and it's fun.
Jun 2015: And there's another reason why what we call the Overground matters. When part of it isn't working, how do we know which part that is?
London Overground
LONDON OVERGROUND: Sunday 7 June, until 1000, no service between Liverpool Street and Chingford. Use local buses via all reasonable routes between Liverpool Street, Hackney Downs and Chingford. Replacement buses operate between Walthamstow Central and Chingford.
Replacement buses operate Service L3: Walthamstow Central - Wood Street - Highams Park - Chingford First trains will operate as follows: 0955 Chingford to Liverpool Street 1018 Liverpool Street to Chingford
LONDON OVERGROUND: Sunday 7 June, until 1000, no service between Liverpool Street and Enfield Town / Cheshunt (via Seven Sisters). Use local buses via all reasonable routes between Liverpool Street and Seven Sisters. Replacement buses operate between Seven Sisters and Enfield Town / Cheshunt.
Replacement buses operate Service L1: Seven Sisters (for London Underground Victoria line) - Bruce Grove - White Hart Lane - Silver Street - Edmonton Green - Bush Hill Park - Enfield Town; Service L2: Seven Sisters (for London Underground Victoria line) - Bruce Grove - White Hart Lane - Silver Street - Edmonton Green - Southbury - Turkey Street - Theobalds Grove - Cheshunt Note: First trains will operate as follows: 1000 Liverpool Street to Enfield Town 1015 Liverpool Street to Cheshunt, via Seven Sisters 1022 Enfield Town to Liverpool Street 1031 Cheshunt to Liverpool Street, via Cheshunt
LONDON OVERGROUND: Sunday 7 June, until 1230, no service between Gospel Oak and Highbury & Islington due to Network Rail track works. Replacement buses operate between Hampstead Heath and Highbury & Islington, please interchange between trains and buses at Hampstead Heath.
Replacement buses operate Hampstead Heath - Gospel Oak (Agincourt Road / Southampton Road) - Kentish Town West - Camden Road - Holloway Road (for London Underground Piccadilly line and Caledonian Road & Barnsbury) - Highbury & Islington
LONDON OVERGROUND: Sunday 7 June, no service between Clapham Junction and Kensington (Olympia) due to Earl's Court redevelopment works. Please use local London Buses services via any reasonable
Wouldn't these disruptions be much, much clearer if each of the Overground's constituent lines were given their own separate identity? The Chingford line is closed before 10am, the Enfield Town and Cheshunt lines ditto. The North London line is closed all morning between Gospel Oak and Highbury & Islington. The West London line is closed south of Olympia all day. The Emerson Park line is closed on Sundays. And the Watford line, the East London line and the Goblin are all open and unobstructed.
Aug 2015: I think we have a new contender for TfL's worst map. Perhaps not surprisingly it's on the Overground. Until TfL admits that there are in fact several Overgrounds, rather than colouring them all orange and promoting them all equally, this sort of mess is alas increasingly likely.
Apr 2021: One of the most headline-grabbing commitments in Sadiq Khan's manifesto is that he plans to rename the Overground lines. When the London Overground was first introduced in 2007 it made some sense to brand the whole thing under one name. A single orange loop with tentacles flailing out towards Watford, Richmond, Croydon, Stratford and Barking was visually comprehensible, if much less so when service updates needed to be communicated. What really broke things was the takeover of lines out of Liverpool Street, making northeast London a mess of tangled spaghetti and piling on the confusion over what 'minor delays' might actually mean. Splitting up the six lines makes enormously good sense. But what to call them?
Jul 2023: A new page has appeared on the TfL website called 'Naming London Overground lines' and posters have started popping up at Overground stations. They say "TfL and the Mayor of London have launched a programme of community engagement to name individual lines on London Overground. Over the next few months we'll be speaking to London Overground customers and different communities to understand more about the history of the network and the people it serves. London Overground lines are to be named to make the network easier to navigate and ensure the Capital's transport system reflects its rich and diverse history. We aim to make the changes by the end of 2024."
Feb 2024: Here we are three months before the next mayoral election and the six individual line names have just been launched. They'll creep out slowly over the next six months, with a big rebranding burst during one week in August, before taking their place as separately coloured lines on the tube map. The names are as diverse as promised, indeed they're what blinkered grumps might describe as woke, and they reference women's rights, the AIDS pandemic, immigration and medieval history. The overall brand and orange roundels will remain.
Nov 2024: The introduction of the six new London Overground names is finally, tangibly, underway. But the changes are being phased in, as befits a seriously complex operation, with some happening now, some delayed until next month or next year, and some kicked far into the future because cost has outweighed practicality. "This is a Windrush line train to Highbury & Islington. Change here for the Mildmay line to Richmond, Stratford and Clapham Junction via Willesden Junction."
The Mayor turned up at Dalston Junction yesterday morning to officially launch the new Overground names by opening some curtains and revealing a plaque that isn't yet on any wall. There were tote bags for everyone. The Windrush name now appears on signs across the station alongside a stream of posters telling the story of Sam King, an Empire Windrush passenger in 1948 and later the first black mayor of Southwark. Rainbow boards and tube map posters have also been updated. You'll look in vain for a pocket tube map though, here and everywhere else across London, because they've all been removed pending a reprint following the discovery of a typo. Oops.
Sep 2006: The Mayor announced yesterday that he's found a cunning way of extending the tube network without forking out billions on new tunnels. He's taking a couple of existing rail services - namely Silverlink's North London line and TfL's East London line - and plans to link the two together by adding in a short stretch of relatively cheap connecting track in the Dalston area. Throw in some new trains and some revamped stations and, hey presto, you have a brand new rebranded railway. Starting in November next year. And it's to be called the "London Overground".
May 2015: The current London Overground comes in five orange flavours, but on 31st May we get two more, namely the old West Anglia lines out of Liverpool Street and the Emerson Park shuttle. And then it'll start to get really confusing working out precisely which Overground is which.
