As Londoners are patently aware, and tourists often fall foul of it, the London Underground survives on rules nobody teaches you, and everybody follows. Stand on the right. Do not make eye contact. Under no circumstances initiate a conversation.
Which is why the Bakerloo line becoming the Bakerl0.0 felt quietly disruptive. Crafted with visuals wrong enough to trigger a cognitive twig, a zero slipped into the name and opened in a space where cans have been banned since 2008, all in service of hawking alcohol free lager during this hallowed month of abstinence.
Instead of a big, flashy stunt, they chose a behaviour nudge hidden in the infrastructure. There were a few bells and whistles as part of a Dry January activation: station names were tweaked, free cans were handed out at Waterloo, and some Oyster card holders pointed people to pubs serving 0.0 on draught. Nice one.
But what looked like a typical, seemingly harmless brand takeover immediately split opinions.
For some, it was playful tomfoolery. A small glitch in the commute that made people look up, ask questions, and nudge each other. The zero became an icebreaker, and mute commuters had permission to raise an eyebrow, and, God forbid, have a chat. Good stuff.
For others, it crossed a line. Disability campaigners pointed out that consistency is not cosmetic and should not be trifled with. For people with visual impairments, learning disabilities, neurodivergent conditions, fatigue, or brain fog, clarity is the whole point. Altering established names adds friction and stress in the name of advertising a beer. Not good stuff.
Then came the printing error. Kilburn Park and Maida Vale flipped. Reddit spotted it, social amplified it. To me, that’s either a genuine cock up with perfect viral timing or clever Easter eggery engineered to spark backlash and chat. A deliberate wrongness that reads as accidental misinformation, helped along by the brand’s vacuum of comment. Very good stuff, if you like your earned media slightly radioactive.
It’s impressive they didn’t settle for a safe, poster-based idea. Still, a tone-deafness is definitely embedded as a lack of understanding for those who depend on the system for help, not for jokes or rented ad space. And the fact that the underground is for the many, not the few. Feels like TFL should have had more to say on that front during the idea’s inception.
The weakest part is not the joke. It is the margin for error. When you play within civic infrastructure, the burden of care is higher, and tolerance is thinner.
