Tories want to rename LUL Lines

I smell another lobbying group behind this, "suggesting" ways of raising money, ignoring the implementation costs involved

Actually BBC have got it wrong, if you read the report they suggest that stations could be sponsored but there's no mention of lines other than ex-Deputy chair of TfL Daniel Moylan dismissing the idea of “Sainsbury’s Northern Line” as “unacceptable”.

glaconservatives.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Untapped-Resource.pdf

They’ve done a survey of members of the public to back up their proposal but not a survey of the big businesses they are hoping to attract which you would have thought would be more informative. By their own admission they admit have no idea how much money it would raise but they hail the sponsorship deals on the Bike Hire Scheme and the Cable Car as examples of how this would work which is amusing as they seem to have brought little benefit to TfL while proving very generous to Barclays and Emirates.

There are already many National Rail stations sponsored by companies, and displaying phrases such as "Home of..." on often barely-legible bespoke signs that must be extremely hard to locate/read for a large section of society, being as far from the clear standardisation of the railway alphabet as you could imagine.

anything this "government" proposes is 99% likely to be dodgy

Westminster, home of The Whopper?

Actually this is just the Tory AMs at the GLA, not the government, Boris doesn’t even seem to be in favour of this and Daniel Moylan pooh-poohed the idea when he was deputy chair at TfL.

A friend reminded me that Tramlink renamed Ampere Way tramstop with IKEA branding. It has since reverted.

Also tube stations are no stranger to corporate sponsorship, Leicester Square was sponsored by Capital Radio, you may remember the big sunshine logo all over the station? Also Camden Town had station sponsorship from an outfit called XFM in 1997.

OVALtine

London Tonight (ITV News London) came up with some just as bad suggestions for station sponsors.

Vauxhall - Vauxhall cars.
London Bridge - ITV News London Bridge.
Bank - Barclays, Natwest or Co-Operative (Geddit?)

They also came up with Greggs for Baker Street.



I can see Surrey CC who own the cricket ground doing something with TfL for Oval station.

Surrey CCC are just tenants, the Oval is owned by the Duchy of Cornwall aka Prince Charles

If you read the report the idea seems to be long term sponsorship deals and rather than a few stickers this would be permanent signage plus the name emblazoned on the Tube map as per the Emirates Cable Car. In 2011 when Oxford Landings wanted to re-brand Oxford Circus TfL wanted £10m for ten years to keep in with the intellectual property laws , they only wanted 3 months for a lot less so the deal fell through.

Wembley Pork

Arsenal funded all the sign changes, map changes and so on, so whether they got a cheap bargain or not remains to be seen.

The plan was to move the station to Ashburton Grove on the opening of the new ground, Arsenal were going to fund that as well, but for some reason it never happened.

Which point in time are you taking as your baseline? There used to be much more advertising on platforms than there is now - Charing Cross (now Embankment) 1894, Blackfriars 1935, Paddington 1955

I personally have no problem with advertising or other special liveries if they are tasteful, DDA compliant, don't clash with the standard livery, don't cause confusion and aren't excessive. The black advertising livery on the DLR was well done, the white-based mobile livery was not.
Not excessive to me means that the significant majority of the fleet needs to be in standard livery and the number of different liveries at any one time needs to be limited. It should be extremely unusual to see two non-standard livery trains in a row (so that anyone who doesn't recognise the train for a standard one gets the second train to come) and diagramming should be done to avoid this happening where practical.
The option of wrapping just one car in a train should also be considered, although there should never be more than one such special livery on any one train.