So London’s new crossrail is to be called the Elizabeth line - adding another track to those named for royals including the Jubilee and Victoria. Its relevance might be questioned on the grounds that you won’t find many of the Windsor family battling rush hour on public transport, but who could burst the balloon for the besuited rail chiefs getting royal selfies as they showed the Queen around when she duly turned up to have a look wearing head to toe regal purple to match the new logo.
Crossrail is part of a flurry of openings - streets, schools, hospitals, schools, new housing estates - all finding themselves named, by appropriately undemocratic decree, after the Queen. Its her 90th year after all - but since we’ve had things named after the monarch since she was a child - Princess Elizabeth schools and clinics are ten a penny - that’s almost nine decades of British towns marking royal jubilees, birthdays, weddings, babies, new carpets, and anniversaries by dubbing some hapless institution or playground after her. Even Big Ben wasn’t safe - renamed Queen Elizabeth tower during the diamond jubilee. The royal moniker is everywhere.
Really? Aren’t there a few other names that deserve to be up over public doors? The royalist trend is certainly doing more than any high street chain to litter British towns with generic signage. Even for the monarchists its got to be getting silly. City councillors are already guilty of serious imagination lapses in allowing developers to throw up new estates and apply incongruous names - Willow Courts where there wouldn’t be room to swing a cricket bat never mind grow a tree for example - and the most common street names in the country remain High Street, Station Road and Main Street - maybe helpful for a first time visitor but not exactly imbruing a sense of community or historical place.
A pub close to my home called itself after a spitfire pilot who crashed and died in the street during the Battle of Britain. “I wanted something local to emphasise it was local so I did my research,” the owner told me at the time. He was amazed how few customers had heard of the incident and how interested people were. Certainly the council hadn’t thought to mark that bit of local history in any way, missing a trick that an enterprising landlord put right with a bit of initiative.
There was a brief revolt last year in Glasgow when the Scottish Government completed the biggest hospital in the country. The £842million project was named the South Glasgow University Hospital - ratified by the region’s NHS board. Until the Queen agreed to open it when it suddenly turned into the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital, one of at least 20 hospitals - not counting the units, wards and clinics - so-named across the country.
There was dismay. Some had wanted the hospital named after the Scottish doctor who discovered penicillin, Sir Alexander Fleming, or Mary Barbour, a Govan woman who did much to challenge inequality in health and housing in the city. The changing of the name - including hosting the ceremony, changing the signage and putting up new plaques - cost £100,000.
A petition was signed by over 16,000 as people revolted - Andrew Robertson OBE, chair of Greater Glasgow Health Board said they couldn’t consider other names for the hospital as it would result in disappointment for those whose preferred names weren’t picked. It was an “honour” for staff and patients to meet the queen and have the hospital named after her. I’m really betting the Queen has enough hospitals in her “me” portfolio to truly mind. Staff doctor Keith McKillop - throwing away his own chance for an OBE - wrote to the Glasgow Herald: “Queen Elizabeth is the most potent symbol of the glaring inequalities in our society, a vivid representation of the growing gulf between rich and poor. The name of the new hospital is not unimportant. One of my other bits of paper is an honours degree in theology, so I’m qualified to know that symbols carry meaning, power and influence. I am reluctantly obliged to reinforce the illusion that our hospital, and therefore our health, is the charitable gift of a benevolent monarch to her less fortunate subjects.”
The social justice view aside surely another argument has to be that its really, really boring to name everything after one person, leaving hundreds of worthy folk and local heroes unrecognised, their names allowed to fade from public memory.
Name a racing stable or a battleship or a palace or a tax break or a corgi rescue centre after royalty if you must but lets have public transport and the NHS named in honour of those who value and use it.
