The evolution of bus services in Croxley Green (1970-2020)
Croxley Green is the Metro-land village in southwest Hertfordshire where I grew up. It has a direct tube connection to central London via the Metropolitan line, but this has never been especially convenient for local journeys so the bus network has always been important. A major change occurred fifty years ago in 1970 when London Transport transferred all its out-of-town bus services to a new operator, London Country Bus Services Ltd. Croxley's come a long way since.
In 1971 the local bus network looked like this.
To get your bearings, Rickmansworth is to the southwest, Watford to the east and a few small villages to the northwest. Almost all of the buses passing through Croxley Green are travelling between Rickmansworth and Watford. Most are routed via New Road and Watford Road, a few divert off via Baldwins Lane and express coaches whizz through via Watford Road. If you were a six year-old living on New Road at the time, two dozen buses would have passed your front door every hour. I'm told this may explain a lot.
The backbone of the network in the early 70s was the 321, a two hour trek between Uxbridge and Luton. For practical purposes it was split into two overlapping parts, with the central section between St Albans and Rickmansworth served every fifteen minutes. The 803 was an express version at peak times only and targeted Welwyn Garden City rather than Luton. Meanwhile the 385 and 385A linked estates in Rickmansworth to estates in Garston via the shops in Watford, and here in Croxley followed the Baldwins Lane route. That's all the double deckers.
The 335 and 336 were single deckers linking Watford to Buckinghamshire. Both headed up the Chorleywood Road to Chalfont, once an hour, with the 335 then bearing off to Windsor and the 336 to Chesham. The 318 ran hourly to Hemel Hempstead via the small villages of Sarratt and Chipperfield, while the 318A intermittently served the hamlet of Bucks Hill. That just leaves the two Green Line coaches, both orbital routes and both introduced a few years earlier as streamlined Pay As You Enter services. At this stage the 724 was running from High Wycombe to Romford via St Albans, and taking three hours to do so, while the 727 linked the three airports at Gatwick, Heathrow and Luton. The 724's only stop in Croxley was outside the tube station. The 727 passed straight through without stopping.
Here's a larger scale local bus map from 1975.
This should give you a better idea of how Croxley fits into the wider scheme of things. The biggest change here is the arrival of route 352, first introduced in 1973. This replaced the rural section of route 318 - a long overdue simplification - with a main route heading through Sarratt to Hemel Hempstead every couple of hours while a slightly less frequent spur served Bucks Hill. A less obvious change is that Green Line 724 now terminated at Staines rather than High Wycombe, following a much more useful route via Uxbridge and Heathrow Airport. The 352 and 724 are the only buses still to be serving Croxley 45 years later.
In 1979 a major revamp of local bus services took place with the introduction of eleven 'Watfordwide' routes.
Only three of the new W-prefix routes reached Croxley. The W4 was a lengthy route from Maple Cross to Abbotts Langley running every half an hour. The W5 and W6 were approximate replacements for the 385 and 385A (or the 389, as the 385A had recently become). For passengers in Rickmansworth and Croxley it didn't matter which of these three W buses turned up, they'd all take you to the shops in Watford.
Meanwhile the 321 had disappeared, or rather it had been split in two. Journeys between Rickmansworth and St Albans were renumbered 327, while overlapping Watford to Luton services were deemed more important so retained the better-known 321. Unexpectedly the 327 was now the only route to ply Baldwins Lane, whereas prior history suggested the W5 and W6 should have gone that way instead. 1979 was also the year that Rickmansworth to Uxbridge bus services were lost, the only alternative now to take an hourly Green Line coach.
Here's how 1986 looked, as glimpsed on the edge of the London Transport bus map.
The 321 was back, or rather the parallel 327 renumbering had been abandoned. Its official southern terminus was now Croxley Green Manor Way, a minor sideroad round the corner from a chip shop, so very much a comedown from the Uxbridge glory days. To make up for the subsequent disconnect the half-hourly W5 was diverted via Baldwins Lane, while its cousin the W6 continued via Watford Road.
The only other change, maintained to this day, is that the 336 no longer runs via New Road but follows a quicker route along Watford Road. Although the 724 looks like it's disappeared it was still running, it's just been accidentally omitted from this map. As for the additional 733 this was a short-lived Green Line route linking Hitchin to Reading which stopped only at the tube station.
A few months later bus 'deregulation' came into effect, with the Conservative government opening up the provision of bus services to allcomers. Croxley Green, being two miles outside London, was not immune. Local services were split off to become London Country North West, initially a management buyout, but in 1990 swallowed whole by Luton & District. They were then acquired by British Bus in 1994, who became part of the Cowie Group in 1996 and subsequently rebranded as Arriva.
Which brings us to 1997 where, as you can see, things have become somewhat messier.
A plethora of buses now served Croxley Green, although many ran very infrequently. Mainstays of the new set-up were routes 4, 5 and 7. The 4 was essentially the old W4, the 5 was essentially the old W5 and the 7 was a half-hourly Watford-Rickmansworth shuttle introduced to maintain overall frequencies. But all three buses stopped running around 7pm, and no longer ran on Sundays, so Herts County Council had to step in and pay for routes W4, 344 and 321 to be extended along the same roads in the evenings and at weekends.
The 352 no longer went to Bucks Hill, because those journeys had been briefly rebranded 319 and now only ran once a day. The Rs which have appeared on the map, twiddling around the backroads, were similarly infrequent. The R2 linked to Mount Vernon Hospital every two hours, weekdays only. The R3 ran once on Tuesdays and Thursdays only, while the R4 fitted in two journeys on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Meanwhile the M1 connected Watford to Staines on Saturdays for no obvious reason, which is where unrestricted competition gets you.
Here's 2005's map from the Intalink Travel Guide.
The arrival of colour on the map was useful because if a route was in blue you could generally disregard it. The R4 now ran twice a day, and the R3 and R5 just twice a week. The 622 was a single journey ferrying university students to Hatfield. The unexpected return of the 321 was nothing but a single illusory school run. As for the 41 and 42, these were early morning circulars for key workers and all wrapped up by 6am. Every blue route was an irrelevance - ignore them all.
All Croxley really had by 2005, shown in red, were some stripped down basics. The 5 and 6 were now the key half-hourly services linking Rickmansworth to Watford, with important extensions to Maple Cross, Garston and Hemel Hempstead. The W6 was the renumbered council-funded evening/Sunday stopgap for local residents who still hadn't bought cars. And still the 336, 352 and 724 ploughed on, much the same as ever.
Finally let's come right up to date with the latest pre-lockdown 2020 map.
Now it's red which means 'this bus hardly ever runs', so there are just four black routes left operating at a reasonable frequency. The only bus running more than once an hour is the 320, which is essentially the old 6, which was the old 4, which was the old W4. The 520 is a truncated replacement for the 324 which was scrapped by Arriva in 2018 for being uneconomic (leaving one North Watford estate potentially busless). The W1 is the 520's council-funded Sunday version, because even on a trunk route running a social service doesn't pay. In a strange reversal of long-term circumstances, Baldwins Lane today has a much better bus service than Watford Road.
The 352, first introduced in 1973, is still hanging on with five journeys a day. If you live in Sarratt that's good news, but services to Bucks Hill finally dried up a few years ago (so it's just as well everyone who lives there already has three cars). Alas the 336 has finally disappeared, having been renumbered 103 in 2018 when some marketing wag at Carousel Buses decided to rename their portfolio of routes the 'Chiltern Hundreds'. It also no longer serves Chesham and now stretches all the way to High Wycombe, just as the 724 did fifty years ago. One single express journey before eight in the morning has been numbered X103, should that ever be of importance.
And that's how bus services have evolved in a single Hertfordshire commuter village over the last fifty years. From generous to efficient, from comprehensive to rationalised and from pivotal to marginal. Had Croxley been just across the border into London, I wouldn't have been able to spin you anywhere near as convoluted a tale. It's also an exceptionally niche tale, so if you've read this far well done for getting to the end. But it's also the tale my six year-old self would have most wanted to read... and no doubt been totally amazed by how it all turned out.
