Buses and the post-war challenge

There was no ‘back to normal’ for public transport in post-war London. Many London Transport (LT) buses and sometimes whole garages were destroyed or damaged, to say nothing of the loss of life in the conflict as a whole, and the extended period of austerity to come.  

In 1948 LT was nationalised, as part of the new British Transport Commission, but transport was a lower priority for the government than fundamentals like housing and electricity supplies. On the Underground side, pre-war plans to extend the Northern line to Bushey Heath were dropped, but funds were found for the bus business to convert the extension depot site at Aldenham to a huge new overhaul works.  

The year 1948 also saw the numbers of bus journeys reach a historic high of four million. Income from the buses had subsidised the Underground since 1913, but from 1949, numbers started to fall. Economic growth and the end of petrol rationing in 1950 stimulated a dramatic rise in private car ownership, reducing bus demand and increasing congestion. Traffic made bus services less reliable, encouraging even more travellers to drive, a process that would continue for decades.

LT also faced serious staff shortages, resuming the wartime policy of recruiting women bus conductors. Schemes were also set up to recruit workers direct from Ireland, Malta and the Caribbean island of Barbados, later extended to Trinidad and Jamaica. 

The new Routemaster bus, unveiled in 1954, was for many the high point of LT’s bus engineering tradition, a unique combination of innovative construction, practicality and style. But as numbers increased steadily to replace London’s trolleybus fleet from 1959, services continued to face serious challenges. Routemaster production continued until 1968, and they continued for much longer than anyone could have expected, but with annual losses of more than £5 million, LT policies were shifting away from the traditional double deck crew-operated rear entrance buses.

In September 1966 LT published controversial plans to move to one-person operation, and shorter routes favouring single deck buses to cut costs. The first of these, the route 500 ‘Red Arrow’ service with a flat fare and designed to carry mostly standing passengers, started earlier in the year. After lengthy talks, unions agreed for this model to be extended in 1968, the same year the first ‘bus only’ lanes were introduced. By the end of 1969, LT had started trials of driver-only double deckers, but as the organisation faced the new decade under the control of the Greater London Council, the future was uncertain.