A news story popped up on my computer. It was about trams in London. A section of tramline was being closed in Croydon.
OK, the story did not knock Trump off the front page of the New York Times. But for me it was cataclysmic. I had no idea that there was a trams network in London.
How often had I ruminated about the fate of the London tram. When visiting Zurich some years ago, I was impressed by the brilliant electric-tram service, so noiseless and so planet-friendly by comparison with our diesel-belching buses.
Why can’t we have trams in London, I thought, like those clever Europeans?
I excitedly called the TFL press office to find out more about the London trams network, and was disappointed to discover that it’s very much limited to two services in Croydon, and that there are no plans to create any more.
This is not what we were told by Ken Livingstone back in the day. When running for mayor in 2012, Ken told a conference about his trams vision:
‘If re-elected, I intend to start installing a tram running the length of Oxford Street. We would demolish the gyratory system [at Marble Arch], handing part of it back to green land and building two developments on part of it which will fund the project.’ He said work would be completed by 2018.
It was a beautiful dream. But sadly it never happened. So one has to ask, why is London so, erm, tramsphobic?
We haven’t always been tramsphobic. We used to love trams. The first, installed around 1870, were pulled by horses. Then came steam-powered machines.
The first electric tram started running in 1901 from Hammersmith. By 1906, there were 300 trams on the roads. By 1913, there were 3,000 of them, carrying millions of passengers every year.
Fast forward to the thirties, and trams were on their way out. They were pushed out by the aggressive new diesel buses. In 1946, the London Passenger Transport Board announced that buses were ‘eminently flexible and much cheaper’ than silly old trams.
Two of London Transport’s higher-ups were notably tramsphobic. There was Alexander Valentine of the London Transport Executive, who reckoned that trams caused congestion and made a mess with their overhead wires everywhere. And Albert Stanley, Baron Ashfield, first chairman of London Transport, was a tramsphobe. He liked the Underground and had presided over an enormous extension of the tube network.
In 1950, the tramsphobes were in the ascendant, and one of their number, Labour peer Lord Latham, successor to Stanley, launched Operation Tramaway. By 1952, the operation had been successfully completed: there were no more trams in London. The last one ran in 1952.
There’s a jaunty Pathé newsreel about it on YouTube. ‘It’s goodbye to the old clangers,’ goes the voiceover accompanying some lovely trams footage, complete with gents and ladies driving their open-topped automobiles alongside the double-decker tramcar.
‘Here’s the last tram just arriving into Woolwich from the New Cross depot,’ the newsreader goes on. Large crowds of delighted onlookers gape and cheer. ‘It’s 91 years since London got her first tram. So they’ve had a pretty good run for London’s money.
‘Great-grandpa will tell you there’s not much you can do on the back seat of a Shadow [???] you couldn’t do on the old trams. They had a wonderful sway about them.’
Another wistful film on trams uses the same word, sway. ‘We’ll remember the rattle and the flag and the sway. How snug it was to be inside when it was raining outside.’
This film follows a tram down inside the Kingsway tunnel, which went underneath Holborn and emerged on the Embankment (you can see the entrance today). It then plays an old Cockney music-hall song in praise of the tram, which refers again to their utility as a location for romance: ‘You’d sit close together and spoon all the way.’
We watch the last tram pull in as the crowds – supposedly 20,000 of them – sing ‘Auld Lang Syne’. Then Lord Latham announces, ‘And so, in the name of Londoners, and London Transport, I say, goodbye, old tram.’
Looking back, you wonder why trams were seen as out of date, when today they look like the latest thing. Why, oh why can’t we be like Zurich, which never made the foolish mistake of getting rid of the trams?
