The Routemaster bus is 70 – but its enduring appeal is timeless

Buses have been in the news of late, as the Labour government has granted all local authorities the potential power to take control of services in the area by being able to set timetables and routes and award franchises to operators to better meet transport needs in their areas. These are powers previously only held by London and more recently Manchester, after the national bus network was privatised by Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives in the mid-1980s. This month, however, also sees the 70th birthday of arguably the most famous bus ever built – and one that was the product of paternalistic municipalism rather than market forces.   

It was on 24 September 1954 that the original Routemaster bus was first unveiled to the general public at the Commercial Motor Show in Earl’s Court. As the last bus to be purposely built for the capital by London Transport – then a monolithic public body whose empire, thanks to its Greenline bus services, extended far into the suburban home counties – it was to be the culmination of a line of vehicles that can be traced back to 1910.  

Get the latest news and insight into how the Big Issue magazine is made by signing up for the Inside Big Issue newsletter

Utilising lightweight aluminium construction developed in the air industry and adopted by LT engineers following their stint building Handley Page bombers during the Second World War, it was among the most technically advanced buses of its era. Boasting power-assisted steering, independent front suspension and an automatic gearbox for a smoother ride for passengers, it was intended to match the comfort of private cars at a time when ownership was rapidly rising.

Accordingly, it was kitted out with internal heating and given stylish interiors devised by the leading industrial designer Douglas Scott, finished with burgundy lining panels, Chinese-green window surrounds and yellow ceilings – the latter chosen to help disguise the nicotine stains from smokers on the upper deck. 

Scott was also responsible for finessing the shape of the bus and bodywork. The result was a bus with curves sleek enough to stroke and a front fascia that’s hard not to reconfigure into a smiley face.  

Officially billed as ‘London’s Bus of the Future’, for all its whizzy design and technology, as a double-decker bus with a front engine and separate cab for the driver and an open rear platform entranceway policed by an on-board conductor (‘the clippie’) collecting fares on the decks, it was comfortingly familiar; even slightly old-fashioned.

That was something that possibly helped ensure its enduring appeal in the long term. Especially after they were subsequently replaced by boxier models, bought off the shelf in bulk from other manufacturers, and manned by a single person to cut down on pesky staffing costs.  

• How broken is the UK’s public transport? I spent all day on buses to find out
• London buses transformed into healthcare and support hubs for people sleeping rough

Intended to last just 17 years, only 2,875 Routemasters were ever built and production stopped in 1968. In 1971, London Transport confidently predicted they’d all be off the streets by 1978. And yet their final day would not come until 9 December 2005.  

Memories of that last day came flooding back to me just a couple of  months ago when I attended a rally to mark the Routemaster’s 70th year organised by the Routemaster Owners Association at Chiswick Business Park – the site of London Transport’s former Chiswick Works, where the bus had been born.  

Perhaps inevitably for a gathering of this kind, men of a certain age and girth, with a penchant for tin badges, and clutching notebooks and cameras, were much in evidence. Nevertheless, there were plenty of younger people there too, many far too young to even remember the Routemaster in its working lifetime. Everyone appeared just as delighted to potter about admiring the serried ranks of vehicles, a good few restored to original liveries by transport museum preservationists or proud owners, and all evidently enjoying pampered lives having been freed from the city grind. 

I’d gone to a very similar gathering some 20 years earlier for the 50th anniversary in Finsbury Park. I’d been researching my book The Bus We Loved: London’s Affair With The Routemaster, which was written as they were disappearing from the streets. I was not a bus spotter, merely a grateful passenger disappointed to hear that they were going but curious to understand why this particular bus excited such passion among enthusiasts and ordinary Londoners alike. (Lest we forget the one person to make the most political capital out of opposing their scrapping was a certain Boris Johnson, who put supplying London with a new Routemaster at the heart of his successful 2008 mayoral campaign.)

Two decades on, and now as then, the people I spoke to at Chiswick shared fond reminiscences about childhood excursions and still referred to the Routemaster variously as either an “icon”, “a design classic”, “a proper bus”, or “a piece of London history”.  

David Lee, Routemaster owner and the association’s current press officer, was no exception. His love for Routemasters stemmed, he told me, from South London school days and taking the “190 from Croydon to Coulsdon”. Now based in Wrexham, after initially buying a Routemaster to transport audio-visual equipment for his conferencing business in 2011, he branched out and currently owns four and hires them out for weddings. I am struck that there is much in the way of shared symbolism around ideas of longevity, communal experience and partnerships (on the one hand, conductor and driver, and on the other the happy couple) that might lend a union blessed by a Routemaster ride an added potency.  

At Chiswick, beside stalls laden with bus paraphernalia, from ticket machines and destination boards to timetables and pamphlets and books on every conceivable make and model, there was also a Routemaster converted into a tea room. This was run by Brigit’s Bakery, a firm who were coincidentally also celebrating their 10th year of offering gourmet and specially themed afternoon tea sightseeing tours (Peppa Pig, Taylor Swift and craft gin, among the quirkier options) in specially refitted vintage Routemasters in London.

The tours were the brainchild of the company’s founder Cedric Bloch, a professional motor-racing champion. In 2021, Bloch was left paralysed from the waist down after crashing in a qualifying session for the Bennetts British Superbike Championship at the Snetterton racetrack in Norfolk. This year saw Brigit’s introduce the first wheelchair-friendly Routemaster to its fleet in a fascinating turn of events, given that the lack of disability access was among the reasons they were withdrawn in the first place.   

Such posthumous careers of Routemasters, from wedding carriages to tearooms, though, are surely merely indicative of the broader changes in British society as a whole since the 1950s. Products of the postwar settlement and civic duty and an age of home-grown industrial manufacturing, they have gone on to enjoy second careers in the 21st century growth fields of private leisure and commercial hospitality, their images living on and disseminated digitally via Instagram and TikTok.

Like the bowler hat, a one-time mandatory item in the conformist wardrobe of city workers but now the preserve of eccentrics and fancy dress, the original Routemaster has long since ceased to be the stuff of daily commuter life and is now mostly only wheeled out for special occasions – it is perhaps as dignified a semi-retirement any 70 year-old could wish for, in the end.  

Travis Elborough is the author of The Bus We Loved: London’s Affair with the Routemaster (Granta, £12.99). You can buy it from The Big Issue shop on bookshop.org, which helps to support The Big Issue and independent bookshops.

Do you have a story to tell or opinions to share about this? Get in touch and tell us more. Big Issue exists to give homeless and marginalised people the opportunity to earn an income. To support our work buy a copy of the magazine or get the app from the App Store or Google Play.