Dearly departed

The Economist has a good blog on airport names this week, pointing out the trend for naming them and other key bits of infrastructure after famous locals. If Birmingham is seriously considering renaming theirs after Ozzy Osbourne, the genre would seem to have jumped the shark.

In Glasgow, we now have the Sir Chris Hoy Velodrome. Clearly, on one level this makes sense, as he is not just Scotland's greatest cyclist but Britain's greatest Olympian (who also has a train named after him already). But there's still something about the trend that bothers me.

It's not just that the man strikes me as modest enough to be embarrassed by it (though we should be thankful for that: imagine if they were naming a stadium after Usain Bolt instead). It's also not just that he hasn't even retired yet (what if he competes there in 2014 and flops?) let alone died, which I think should be a minimum qualification for supplying the name of anything noteworthy. It's not hard to think of examples of famous people who have fallen from public grace towards or soon after the end of their lives or careers — not even hard in the realm of cycling — so the authorities will always be leaving themselves hostage to fortune.

It's not just the aesthetics either: compare JFK with its evocative former name, Idlewild. There may be a case for commemorating a few particularly great individuals — I would grudgingly accept Charles de Gaulle, I suppose — but there's not much poetry to be derived from the names of people. Imagine if every London Underground station were instead named after a well-known local: no more Swiss Cottage, Seven Sisters or Gallions Reach. It would be a sad loss to a small but distinctive part of our culture.

More than that, though, it's the idea that society can't really get along without particular individuals, which seems a depressingly authoritarian view of the world, and one that suggests an ahistorical lack of continuity with past and future generations: with the greatest respect to Sir Chris, soon enough he will mean little more to the latter than he did to the former. Nasty dictators still name not just their buildings but even their days of the week after themselves. Augustus did the same with the calendar in his time.

It seems to me a trend that, if we want to see ourselves as egalitarian and democratic — respectful of our heritage but free-thinking and free-naming — we ought to leave in the departure lounge.