Navvies ‘should have London rail line named after them’

IRISH labourers who helped build the railways should have a London Overground line named after them and not the migrant ship Windrush, an eminent historian has said.

Workers known as “navvies” were employed in the 19th and 20th centuries to help build London’s subterranean railways.

Yet the Mayor of London has been accused of ignoring those Irish labourers as part of his multiculturalism-fuelled drive to rebrand the London Overground.

Jeremy Black, emeritus professor of history at Exeter University and author of told

that Sadiq Khan should have given more recognition to the Irish navvies for their sacrifices.

“They were the key group, the marginalised group who were important to the development of the train system,” said the historian.

Mr Khan announced on Thursday that the Overground would be split into six new lines by the autumn.

The new lines’ names are Liberty,

‘They achieved amazing feats of engineering – equipped with little more than picks and shovels’

Lioness, Mildmay, Suffragette, Weaver and Windrush.

Prior to the rebranding, the Overground was depicted on Tube maps as a “mass of orange spaghetti” despite spanning 103 miles and 112 stations.

Prof Black said: “The question has been raised as to why the navvies are not being commemorated.”

Navvies took their name from the canals that they were employed to dig in the late 18th century, which at the time of construction were known as navigations. Those working on navigations were called navigators, or later, navvies.

Many 19th-century railway navvies were fleeing famine in Ireland, according to the National Railway Museum.

“Despite cruel exploitation and extreme deprivation, the navvies achieved amazing feats of engineering – equipped with little more than gunpowder, picks and shovels,” the museum said.

London Underground’s forerunner companies employed thousands of them to dig tunnels and trenches for what would later become the Tube network. Irish labourers continued working on Tube projects until the construction of the Victoria Line in the 1960s.