Aviation Specials – June 2018

36 The London Bus

Y

ou’re standing

on a pavement

thronging with

shoppers, and

Routemasters

(the original kind) are coming

at you in an apparently endless

stream. After a while, it seems

there can scarcely be this many

Routemasters in the whole

world. They just keep coming.

This was London’s Oxford

Street in the late 1960s...and

the late 1970s, and 1980s, and

1990s. By then it seemed that

Routemasters would last forever,

and would always represent the

defining look of Oxford Street, in

transport terms at least.

Oxford Street runs west to east

through London’s West End,

stretching 1.2miles (1.9km)

between the Edgware Road/Park

Lane junction in the west and the

Tottenham Court

Road/Charing

Cross Road junction

in the east.

It has famous

landmarks at both

ends – to the west,

John Nash’s Marble

Arch, which dates

from 1827, and to

the east, property

tycoon Harry

Hyams’s 33-storey

Centre Point, dating

from 1966. Roughly

halfway along is

Oxford Circus,

where Oxford Street

is crossed by the

north-south Regent

Street.

Oxford Street itself

dates back to the

18th century, when

Oxford Street

ABOVE:
Routemasters
meet
Routemasters in
Oxford Street.
Operating the
still cross-London
route 15 was
RML2760, the last
example built in
1968 and by then
in Stagecoach
ownership. These
days it is on
extended loan to
the London Bus
Museum.

The heart of shopping in the West End has been served for decades

by a seemingly endless stream of red double-deckers, but if all goes

to plan they will soon be taken away to open Oxford Street purely

to pedestrians

They kept on coming

ABOVE: Centre Point, where the eastern end

of Oxford Street meets Tottenham Court Road,

undergoing refurbishment in 2014, is dwarfing

a New Routemaster in the street below. Work

to accommodate the Elizabeth Line has taken

up much of the pavement around Tottenham

Court Road Underground station.