A short history of London’s buses

The bus is London’s oldest form of public transport. The coachbuilder George Shillibeer began his service from Paddington to Bank in 1829, but unlike the long-established stage coach services, passengers did not need to book in advance and could hail the vehicle at any point on the route. Shillibeer called his service Omnibus (meaning ‘for all’ in Latin), though it was not affordable to most working people at the time. He gave us the abbreviation ‘bus’, now an internationally recognised term.  

The idea caught on and by 1832 there were 400 horse buses operating in London. The vehicles came from the same workshops as stage coaches, private carriages and agricultural vehicles, fashioned from wood and painted by hand in a variety of colours. The first ‘horseless’ buses had similarly crafted bodies, now attached to factory-built chassis with motors. 

For decades London’s buses were designed and built especially for the city’s unique conditions. The leading operator in the 1850s, the London General Omnibus Company (LGOC) was soon the largest bus company in the world. It developed its own motor bus designs in the 1900s and spawned another successful business, the Associated Equipment Company (AEC), making buses, lorries and vans for London and other cities at home and abroad. This in-house capability meant buses were increasingly standardised in design, manufacture and maintenance, each advance built on the last to deliver a huge and reliable bus fleet. Relaxation of controls on the size of vehicles and rapid innovation produced successive standard types, from the B type of 1910 to the Routemaster (RM) of 1954. 

In the late 1960s and 70s, as bus ridership fell, London Transport chose cheaper off-the-peg buses and driver-only operation on some routes to reduce costs. The new buses were intended to replace the Routemaster, but they were not always successful. In the end the RMs outlived many of them, but one-person-operated (OPO) buses were the norm by the 1980s. 

Buses have evolved from basic wooden open-topped vehicles to highly sophisticated and intricately designed pieces of computerised technology. They have been pulled by horses, and powered by steam, electricity, petrol, diesel oil and pollution-free hydrogen fuel cells. They have become an international symbol of London that has waged war, been serenaded by pop stars, targeted by disability and gay rights protestors, and appeared in London’s LGBTQ+ Pride Parade, as well as the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympic Games. They have kept London moving through wars and pandemics, have been privately owned, nationalised and privatised again, but the big red double decker bus is as powerful a symbol of London as ever.