London Underground Lines Episode 6: The Bakerloo Line

The Line That Named Itself After Where It Went

A Name Invented by a Newspaper

The Bakerloo Line did not name itself. That honour belongs to a journalist. When the Baker Street & Waterloo Railway opened on 10 March 1906, its official corporate title was a mouthful that nobody, passengers, press, or public, was inclined to use in full. The Evening News, casting about for something more manageable, coined a portmanteau: Baker Street and Waterloo, compressed and fused, became Bakerloo.

The railway’s management initially recoiled. ‘Bakerloo’ struck them as undignified, a slang word masquerading as a proper name, unworthy of a serious engineering enterprise. They resisted it in official communications. They preferred the formal title. But language, like water, finds its own level, and the public had already decided. By the time resistance might have had any effect, the name was everywhere: on lips, in newspapers, in casual conversation. The company eventually capitulated, and ‘Bakerloo’ was formally adopted.

This small episode is worth dwelling on, because it established something significant in the cultural history of the Underground. It was the first time a Tube line acquired a popular name through public usage rather than official decree — the first time passengers, rather than boardrooms, did the naming. The Twopenny Tube had been a nickname, an informal label applied to an officially named railway. The Bakerloo was different: the nickname became the name. The distinction matters, because it signals the beginning of an era in which the Underground’s identity was as much a public creation as a corporate one.

The Yerkes Lines: Modernity Imported from America

The Baker Street & Waterloo Railway was one of several deep-level Tube lines financed and developed by Charles Tyson Yerkes, the American transport entrepreneur whose Underground Electric Railways Company of London was, in the early 1900s, reshaping the capital’s underground transport at remarkable speed. Yerkes had made his fortune building and operating urban railways in Chicago and had arrived in London with capital, confidence, and a clear vision of what a modern electric underground railway could be.

The lines associated with Yerkes, the Bakerloo, the Piccadilly, and the extensions to the Hampstead Tube, shared certain characteristics that set them apart from the Victorian railways that had preceded them. They were built to a consistent standard, using similar tunnelling techniques, similar rolling stock, and similar station designs. They were planned with an eye to throughput and operating efficiency rather than the ad hoc pragmatism that had characterised earlier construction. They were, in the language of their time, rational.

Yerkes himself died in 1905, before the Bakerloo opened, and before most of his ambitions for the London network were realised. But the company he founded continued his programme, and the lines that bore his indirect imprint — including the Bakerloo — represented a new chapter in Underground history: the shift from Victorian improvisation to something approaching systematic planning. The Bakerloo was not merely a new line; it was an argument for a new way of building cities.

The Route and What It Meant

The original Bakerloo ran from Baker Street in the north, a name already loaded with associations from the Metropolitan Railway and, by 1906, from the fictional detective who lived at 221B, south through Regent Street, Oxford Circus, Piccadilly Circus, and Charing Cross to Lambeth North on the south bank. It was a route that connected the genteel residential streets of Marylebone with the working-class districts south of the Thames, passing through the commercial and entertainment heart of the West End along the way.

This north-south orientation through the West End gave the Bakerloo a character distinct from the Central Line’s east-west logic. Where the Central Line served the axis of commerce and finance, the Bakerloo served the axis of leisure and transit, the route taken by theatre-goers, shoppers on Regent Street, commuters changing at Waterloo for the mainline south. Its geography expressed a different kind of urban demand: not the steady daily flow of workers between dormitory and office, but the more irregular, more varied movement of a city that had many reasons to move.

Early Branding and the Power of Identity

The Bakerloo’s accidental branding success was not lost on those managing the Underground network in its early decades. The ease with which ‘Bakerloo’ had entered everyday usage, the naturalness with which it sat on the tongue, the way it combined geographical information with something approaching personality, pointed toward a truth about how urban railways acquire meaning in public life.

A railway line is not just an engineering artefact; it is a cultural one. Passengers do not merely use it; they identify with it, navigate by it, describe their neighbourhoods in relation to it. ‘I’m on the Bakerloo’ is not just a locational statement; it is a statement about a particular kind of journey, a particular quarter of the city, a particular relationship to London’s geography. The name carries that weight because it is short, distinctive, and, crucially, feels as though it belongs to the people who use it rather than the company that operates it.

The Underground Group, which consolidated several of the Tube lines under a single management in the years before the First World War, was alive to this. The visual identity developed by Frank Pick, who joined the Underground Group in 1906 and would go on to become one of the great figures of British design historym was built on the understanding that a transport system is also a brand, and that a brand lives in the minds of its users as much as on its signage. The Bakerloo’s name was, in this context, a piece of found branding: raw material that the public had already shaped into something useful.

Extensions and the Limits of Growth

The Bakerloo was extended northward in stages through the early twentieth century, absorbing sections of the London and North Western Railway’s tracks to push beyond Baker Street to Paddington, Maida Vale, Kilburn Park, and eventually Harrow & Wealdstone. These northern extensions gave the line a dual character: deep-tube south of Baker Street, surface-level railway north of Queen’s Park, sharing tracks with what would eventually become the London Overground.

Southward, the line was extended briefly to Elephant & Castle, its current southern terminus, in 1906, though the full southern extension took shape gradually. Proposals for further extensions, particularly a long-discussed southern extension toward Lewisham and Camberwell that would relieve the heavily congested Old Kent Road corridor, have circulated for decades without resolution, representing one of the most persistent unbuilt chapters in London transport planning.

The northern extension’s use of existing surface railway tracks also means that the Bakerloo, uniquely among the deep-level Tube lines, operates partly under open sky. This hybrid nature, partly buried, partly exposed, gives it an operational complexity that its founding engineers might not have anticipated, and it makes the question of any future extension, north or south, entangled with the broader politics of track-sharing between Transport for London and the national rail network.

Why It Matters

The Bakerloo Line’s significance is perhaps less immediately dramatic than the Northern’s claim to the first deep electric railway or the Circle’s claim to have been built by accident. But its contributions to Underground history are real and lasting:

• It established, for the first time, that a Tube line’s popular identity could originate with its passengers and then be formally adopted by its operators. This precedent, that public language matters more than corporate language, echoed through the subsequent history of how London’s transport system communicates with its users.
• It was among the first fruits of the Yerkes programme of systematic deep-tube construction, demonstrating that underground railways could be built to a consistent standard at scale, rather than improvised line by line in response to commercial pressure.
• Its early alignment with Frank Pick’s developing vision of the Underground as a designed environment, coherent, legible, aesthetically intentional, made it part of the foundation on which one of the great twentieth-century examples of public design was built.
• Its hybrid deep-tube and surface operation north of Queen’s Park foreshadowed the later integration of Tube and Overground services, and the ongoing complexities of operating a unified network on infrastructure built to different standards at different times.

The Bakerloo Today

The Bakerloo Line of today runs its familiar brown stripe from Harrow & Wealdstone in the northwest to Elephant & Castle in the south, passing through some of London’s most storied territory: Paddington, Marylebone, Oxford Circus, Waterloo. It is not the longest line, nor the busiest, nor the most technically complex. But it has a quality that eludes precise definition, a sense of character, of specificity, of having belonged to London for long enough to have become part of the city’s texture.

Some of that character is embedded in the name itself. Bakerloo. It is not a word that requires explanation once you know it; it simply is what it is, compressed, particular, a small linguistic monument to the two places it originally connected. That a journalist coined it in 1906 as a throwaway convenience, and that it outlasted every official objection to it, and that it is now as permanent a feature of the London vocabulary as Waterloo itself, is one of the more charming accidents in the history of public transport.