In fact the roundel logo proved to be easily recognisable, memorable and flexible in use. It could be solid or open. A red roundel on a white background denoted a compulsory stop for buses, a green one a compulsory stop for Greenline coaches. A white roundel on a red background meant a request stop for buses, and a green background the same for coaches. On the underground, it could be used with the bar denoting the name of the line, or at stations the name of the station. Few trademarks have proved so durable, yet at the same time, adaptable to different circumstances. The name LONDON TRANSPORT was on the side of buses in gold letters, while on coaches the name was GREENLINE, but with London Transport in much smaller letters below.

Publicity

Despite the hardships of the Great Depression and the fact that, apart from the short-lived boom generated by the coronation of King George VI in 1937, traffic was down and remained so from 1919 to 1939, London Transport and the four grouped railway companies produced a steady flow of publicity material, much of it very high quality and fondly remembered. The LMS posters showing its workforce behind the scenes, getting locomotives ready in ‘The Day Begins’, or working on the line, were especially evocative, at least for railway enthusiasts. The Great Western actually thought of its passengers, and apart from posters, its promotion included a set of booklets and maps so that the traveller could learn more about the places through which the train passed.

For commuters, the Southern Railway had ‘Live in Kent and be Content,’ and ‘Live in Surrey, Far from Worry,’ to promote the ease of commuting on its newly-electrified lines. The alliteration of Kent/content and Surrey/worry had one drawback, there could be no such slogan for Sussex, for a long time commuter territory, but much more so once the Southern electrified the Brighton line. The Southern was never solely a commuter railway, and ‘Sunny South Sam’ was designed to draw holidaymakers to the south coast, but sadly the actor who posed as the railway guard in the campaign died shortly after it started and it never reached its full potential.

The railways did much of their own marketing and advertising separately, but when offices were opened in Paris and New York to encourage visitors, they did so under the aegis of ‘British Railways’. The term pre-dated nationalisation as it was also used from time to time on joint advertising for such services as luggage sent in advance, or to encourage dog owners to have their pet accompany them on journeys.

CREATOR OF THE FIRST INTEGRATED PUBLIC TRANSPORT SYSTEM:

Frank Pick, 1878-1941

After serving articles as a solicitor, Pick joined the North Eastern Railway in 1902, and became personal assistant to Sir George Gibb two years later. When Gibb moved to the Underground Electric Railways in 1906, Pick followed, and from 1909 was in charge of marketing. When the UER acquired the London General Omnibus Company in 1912, he became commercial manager for the entire group, often known as the ‘Combine’. During the First World War, he was seconded to the Board of Trade, but returned to the UER in 1919 and was appointed managing director under Lord Ashfield in 1928. When the UER was absorbed into the new London Passenger Transport Board in 1933, he became vice-chairman, and took much of the credit for creating the world’s largest integrated passenger transport system. He was also notable for his emphasis on good design, be it in marketing material, buildings or bus and trains.

During the Second World War, he became director-general of the Ministry of Information.

London Transport advertising was also good, and often event-based, which served the double purpose of alerting the race or theatre-going public to forthcoming attractions. Nevertheless, London Transport’s biggest and most enduring contribution on the publicity front was the underground map, a schematic map which placed more attention on connections than on geographical accuracy, so that the stranger could get from A to C with a change at B with the minimum of confusion. Both these items survived the London Passenger Transport Board, the London Transport Executive and the London Transport Board, and are still used by Transport for London. The difficult task of creating a single entity out of the many bus and tram operators and of the underground fell to one man, Frank Pick, who also had a flare for publicity.

Rightly regarded as an outstanding example of twentieth century design, the London Underground map was designed by an unemployed electrical engineer, Harry Beck, in 1931. With a keen sense of humour, he once described the map as ‘The Underground straight eight all-electric skit-set circuit diagram.’ Apart from the River Thames, shown meandering through the map, and the position of the mainline stations on the underground network, the map showed no surface detail, and was regarded as being ‘too revolutionary’ by the Underground Group, but they soon changed their minds, and in 1933, a free pocket edition was issued for the first time. The map has withstood the test of time and the original eight lines have grown to fourteen. Harry Beck himself was in charge of the changes, until 1964. Today, the map is digitalised, which makes updating it easier. One cannot help but take the tube map as a quirk of fate. Who other than an electrical engineer would have thought of such a map, concentrating as it did on connections? That is not a criticism of the map; it is an appreciation as a modern-day commercial artist in one of the great design companies would be hard pressed to produce anything so clear, so easily understood, and so capable of standing changing times and changing fashions.

The new London Transport

The new London Transport soon set about extending its underground lines, eventually merging the City & South London and the Hampstead lines to make the new Northern Line, with a City branch and a West End branch, the only underground line to offer two routes through the centre in this way.

Not every underground railway passed in to its control. The Waterloo & City Line has already been mentioned, but another line that escaped the LPTB’s clutches was the East London Railway, which did not pass into London Transport control until railway nationalisation in 1948, by which time the LTPB itself was no longer and London Transport had become the operating arm of the British Transport Commission’s London Transport Executive. A compromise occurred on the Hammersmith & City Line, which the LPTB operated jointly with the Great Western Railway, while complete control passed to the London Transport Executive on mainline railway nationalisation in 1948.

In 1937, London Transport persuaded the Southern Railway to rename its terminus, St Paul’s, to Blackfriars, so that the name could be used on the Central Line without causing confusion.

Even while the LPTB was in formation, the Piccadilly line was extended during 1932-33, running over line abandoned by the District to Hounslow and South Harrow, and over the Metropolitan Line to Upminster, using a new stretch of tube, while surface sections took it to Southgate and Cockfosters, giving an Uxbridge to Cockfosters run of thirty-two miles. A short branch was provided from Holborn to Aldwych, which was closed in 1994. The Hounslow branch was extended in 1977 to London Heathrow Airport, the first deep level tube link to any airport in the world, and in 1986, a loop was added to serve Terminal 4.

In 1937, the Central London Railway was renamed the Central Line, having been completely modernised between 1935 and 1940 under the Treasury-sponsored New Works Programme. The original central third rail power supply was replaced by the LT standard third and fourth rail. Not all of the LPTB’s ambitions could be completed in time. The extension of the Central Line to Loughton, Epping and Hainault opened between 1947 and 1949, when services from Liverpool Street to these towns ended, leaving the Central Line, so busy in the heart of London, the most rural of the deep level tube lines at its eastern end. Not all of the extension was on the surface, and it needed four miles of new tube tunnel before the former Great Eastern lines could be reached. A further extension to Ongar was electrified in 1957, but closed in 1994. To the west, what was by this time the Western Region of British Railways took the line to West Ruislip in 1948.

The Bakerloo had already extended itself to run over the London & North Western Railway’s tracks to Watford as early as 1917. A plan to extend the line south to Camberwell was authorised in 1931, almost on the eve of the creation of the LPTB, reconsidered in 1949, but then abandoned. One extension that did take place was in 1939, when the line was used to reduce congestion on the inner section of the Metropolitan Line through a new tube link between Baker Street to Finchley Road so that Bakerloo trains could run to Stanmore.

The Metropolitan Railway, or Metropolitan Line as it became under LPTB control, had reached Uxbridge in 1904, Watford in 1925 and Stanmore in 1932. The extent of its rural lines, eventually reaching out to Chesham and Amersham, was used by the Metropolitan to argue against its incorporation into the LPTB, but without success. The New Works programme for the Metropolitan called for electrification to be extended to Amersham and the line between Harrow and Rickmansworth to be four-tracked, but while the plans were formulated in 1935, little happened before the Second World War, other than the extension of the Bakerloo trains to Stanmore over Metropolitan metals. Post-war, the national financial situation meant further delays. In some ways this was just as well. The line was becoming busier, and the original electrification plans involved using steam-hauled stock with slam door carriages and compartments converted to electric multiple units, using the same techniques that had served the Southern Railway and its predecessors so well. The implications of running such trains through the ‘in town’ section of the line, and the lack of emergency passage between the carriages when running underground meant that post-war such ideas had to be completely recast, and new rolling stock with sliding doors and 2+3 abreast seating was designed, known as the ‘A’ for Amersham stock.

The Bakerloo running over what had become London Midland Scottish Railway lines was as nothing to the status of the District Line, successor to the Metropolitan District Railway, which in 1933, had just 25 out of its 58¾ route miles over its own tracks.

Later renamed in 1937 as the Northern Line, the Edgware Highgate & Morden line, which had originated from the Hampstead Line and the City & South London Railway, benefited from a programme of works that eventually included new rolling stock in 1938, as well as extension of its network over London & North Eastern branches to High Barnet and East Finchley. Plans to extend the line beyond Edgware to Bushey Heath were dropped post-Second World War. When formed, the Northern included a Northern City section that was separate from the rest of its network, but transferred to British Railways in 1975. While less exotic than the Piccadilly, which served some of the most fashionable destinations, the Northern was no mean undertaking, and remains a vital link in the underground network. Until 1988 and the opening of the Channel Tunnel, the tunnel from East Finchley to Morden via Bank (the City branch of the Northern) was, at 17¼ miles, the longest continuous railway tunnel in the world, while the station platforms at Hampstead are the deepest on the London underground at 192 feet below ground level.

On the roads

As Appendix II shows, the LPTB absorbed a large number of road transport undertakings, of which many were operating trams and just one, the London United Tramways, was operating trolleybuses. There were many bus operators, including a number of small operators in the rural areas cast into the London Transport pot, but others were well established.

In contrast to the railways, most of which were in one large group, the ‘Underground’, and highly standardised within each railway or ‘line’, as they became under the LPTB, the bus and tram undertakings showed little standardisation. For the LPTB, the day of the tram was, if not over, then with a limited future. Much neglected and overlooked today, except in a few countries such as Italy, the trolleybus offered most of the benefits of the motor bus and many of those of the tram. Indeed, even in the early 1930s, the trolleybus was more reliable than the motor bus, while it was also more flexible than the tram and installing a trolleybus route did not involve digging up the roads. Oddly, the first LUT trolleybuses, which looked like six-wheeled variants of the current motorbuses, even to having a half cab whereas later versions were fully fronted, were slow, and the rapid acceleration and good hill-climbing of later vehicles, which made them so suitable for the hills of north London, was conspicuous by its absence. The public nicknamed them ‘diddlers’, but whether this was a knock at the acceleration, or lack of it, or the noise of the compressors, has been lost in time.

In some cities, the trolleybus was seen as a cheap means of extending the tram network, but in London, they were soon seen as replacements. The new LPTB quickly decided to replace all trams in London with ‘more modern vehicles’. Conversion began in 1935 with trams in south-west, west, north-west, north and east London being replaced by trolleybuses, and rapid progress was made until 1940, when wartime shortages brought the programme to an end, leaving the ‘South London’ trams and the ‘Kingsway routes’ 31, 33 and 35, as the only tram routes left operating to survive the war.

Few seem to have mourned the passing of the trams. The often rough ride and draughty interiors from having an open doorway at both ends, meant that many found the trolleybus a big step forward in comfort, and it was quiet.

The London bus scene was far from chaotic when the LPTB was formed. There were indeed the ‘pirate’ bus operators who would move onto another company’s route and run one bus just before and another just behind, known as a ‘chaser’, to catch the incumbent operator’s passengers, and offering lower fares. But for the most part, the LGOC and its associates, of which Tilling had become one, saw cooperation as more important than competition, giving the system stability. The LGOC route numbering system was also used by its associates from before the First World War, but an impetus to standardisation came with the London Traffic Act of 1924, which imposed a route numbering scheme on all bus operators in the central area, known as the Bassom Scheme, after the then chief commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. The full length of a route was allocated a number, whilst short workings used letter suffixes. There was no great urgency on this matter and it was not until 1934 that the LPTB overhauled the route numbering system, which had to take into account country operations as well and the municipal tramways. The early system was:

Routes 1 to 199, London red double deck services;

200-290, London red single deck services;

290-299, central London night bus services;

300-399, London country or green bus services north of the River Thames;

400-499, London country or green bus services south of the River Thames;

500-699, trolley bus services.

Greenline coaches were given letters instead of numbers until after the Second World War when numbers in the 7XX series were allocated to these services, which continued to grow and later included a number of routes that did not cross the central area. Wartime staff shortages and the need to conserve fuel also saw many of the 2XX routes converted to double-deck whenever practical, so the 240 became double deck, but the 240A did not and essentially became a feeder into the 240, while the 210, with a low bridge, remained steadfastly single deck. Later, ‘N’ prefixes were introduced for night buses.