Transport for London Continues Branding Expansion as Actual Service Improvements Remain Aspirational

By Lowri Griffiths | The London Prat

Transport for London has renamed the Overground lines, giving each line its own identity, colour, and name in a rebranding exercise that cost a sum of money that TfL has been careful not to publicize but that engineers who work for TfL have been less careful about in conversations overheard at the Euston Tap. The lines now have names like Mildmay, Windrush, Weaver, Suffragette, Liberty, and Lioness, which are either meaningful tributes to London’s history and communities or a marketing team’s output, depending on whether you are a TfL communications director or someone who uses the Overground regularly and would primarily like it to come more often.

The Overground: What It Actually Does

The Overground is extremely useful. This needs to be said plainly before the criticism, because the Overground is one of the best things that happened to North and East London in the past twenty years, connecting areas that were previously badly served by the tube with direct routes to major interchanges that have reduced commute times and expanded the range of neighbourhoods that people can affordably live in. I take it several times a week. It is usually on time. When it is not on time, the app tells me, which is better than the situation before the app when I stood on the platform like a Victorian waiting for information that was not coming.

The names are fine. The names are harmless. The names are the kind of thing that costs money and produces press releases and does not improve service frequency or capacity, which is what the Overground actually needs in the sections where it runs at intervals that are inconsistent with its function as a high-frequency urban transit network. The Mildmay line, which covers the North London Line from Richmond to Stratford, runs at 10-15 minute intervals during peak hours on some sections, which is adequate and not excellent.

What I Would Have Spent the Money On

I would have spent the money on frequency improvements, which would require infrastructure investment rather than a branding exercise, which is why the branding exercise happened instead. Infrastructure investment requires capital budgets. Branding exercises require communications budgets. Communications budgets at TfL are smaller than capital budgets but easier to approve in a period when TfL is managing debt that the pandemic produced and that the government has been negotiating the terms of ever since.

The Liberty line, which is what the Gospel Oak to Barking section is now called, has been running diesel trains on non-electrified track that TfL has been planning to electrify since before I moved to North London. The electrification project is in progress. It is proceeding. The diesel trains are running. They are now running under the name Liberty, which is either ironic or coincidental.

For London transport and TfL coverage, see Evening Standard. For North London community news, visit MyLondon. For London transport analysis, see CityAM.

Lowri Griffiths writes from North London with the directness of someone who has watched the city change around her and formed views about whether the changes are improvements. London in 2026 remains simultaneously extraordinary and exhausting, beautiful and unaffordable, among the world’s great cities and among its most difficult to live in without inherited wealth or an income in the top decile. She covers it because it is where she lives and because the story it tells about urban life, economic inequality, culture, and community in the twenty-first century is worth telling with honesty and occasional outrage. She does not claim to be neutral. She claims to be accurate, which is harder and more useful.

I started writing about North London because I lived here and nobody was writing about it the way I wanted to read about it: honestly, with affection and criticism in equal measure, without the twee village-in-the-city framing that lifestyle journalism uses and without the class anxiety that serious journalism uses when it notices that people are paying extortionate rents to live somewhere that has a good bus service and a Waitrose. North London is a place where people actually live, and living somewhere is more complicated than either of those framings captures. I write the complication. Lowri Griffiths, bigsmokebrokecom.

The North London I cover is not the North London of property supplements, which features period features and excellent school catchment areas and the phrase ‘up and coming’ applied to every street within cycling distance of a farmers market. It is the North London of the 141 bus, the Haringey housing waiting list, the Turkish social clubs on Green Lanes, the Hackney planning meetings, the Tottenham High Road, and the Overground trains that are reliable enough to build a commute around. It is a place, not a postcode lifestyle category, and I am stubborn about covering it as a place.

What London journalism owes its readers is the same thing all journalism owes its readers: accuracy about what is actually happening, context for why it is happening, and the honesty to say when something is going wrong rather than finding the positive angle that makes the story easier to read and less useful. North London is going through changes that are making it both better in some ways and less affordable, less accessible, and less diverse in others, and both things are happening simultaneously and deserve simultaneous coverage. I am trying to provide that coverage, one piece at a time, from the perspective of someone who lives here, pays rent here, takes the bus here, and wants the place to be better than it is.