Today the Mayor of London made a bold and agenda-setting announcement: that London’s Overground trains would be getting new names to “reflect London’s rich local culture and history”. Though we were spared an NHS line (the parallels with delays and strikes were all too obvious), these new names (Lioness line, Windrush line etc. ) are very much ideologically simpatico.
As Mary Harrington writes for UnHerd, out are history’s great men and in are ” structural forces, “systemic” ills and other more nebulous dynamics”. But there’s also a bigger problem: just how historically accurate are these lines? Helen Lewis points out that the Mayor’s promotional tweet for the Suffragette line features a statue of Millicent Fawcett — who “rather notoriously, was not a Suffragette”. The one problem with a ‘Current Thing’ approach to history is that a lot of those pesky facts get in the way of a convenient narrative.
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