London transport can be a sensitive topic for discussion. This is because despite the fact it remains laughably overpriced and scandalously overcrowded, it’s still nowhere near as bad as transport in the north, where the hourly trams are still powered by sand and where most of the municipal bus network was personally dynamited in a series of overnight raids by Geoffrey Howe in the mid-1980s because, according to his memoirs, he “just felt like it”.
Nonetheless this is still a vast and a significant economic entity. And Transport for London is doing an interesting thing right now. A consultation is under way to choose names for the various London Overground lines, a mess of meandering ribbon pegged out across 113 stations, shuttling 189 million journeys each year through the lateral neighbourhoods of the city, but which is still known, with a kind of shrug, as the Orange Line.
