This may be the heritage-nerdiest bus stop in London.
It's the bus stop at the end of South Croxted Road, close to the foot of Gipsy Hill. It's very old, it's locally listed and it's served by buses on route 3. More to the point it has an incredibly detailed information board inside relating the story of the shelter, local roads and local bus routes, which if you're borderline obsessive will keep you happily occupied while you wait for the next bus to turn up.
Southwark Local List
Wooden Bus Shelter
South Croxted Road SE21 8AY (Dulwich Wood ward)
Single-storey open-fronted bus shelter finished in close-boarded timber with braced timber posts and shingle roof
What we have here is an old tram shelter, not that trams ever came anywhere near here, the Dulwich Estate wouldn't have stood for it. But after London's tram network was decommissioned some of the old shelters were shifted to alternative locations and so it was with this rustic beauty. We don't know precisely where it came from, only that it was relocated from elsewhere in the borough of Camberwell. The acquisition of a bus shelter on this site was first discussed by the Dulwich Estate Board in 1959 in conjunction with negotiations about sites for new council housing. I hope you're getting some idea of the heritage-nerdiness here already.
It's a big shelter and wouldn't have fitted on the existing pavement, so the tenant of the house at 110 Alleyn Road was contacted with a view to giving up some of her garden. Her name was Mrs Edwards and in October 1960 she agreed to relinquish a corner of her garden not in return for payment but for a five-year extension to her lease. Camberwell council then paid for surveyors' fees, legal costs, paving charges and the cost of setting back and reconstructing the fences. The current house at number 110 isn't the original, it was built in the mid-1970s on the site of Mrs Edwards', but you can still clearly see the shelter-sized indentation in her tree-filled garden.
The shelter has oak beams, a pitched roof and is three bays wide. It's quite spacious inside, easily large enough to accommodate a primary class setting off on a school trip but maybe not all their accompanying adult hangers on. A couple of roof tiles have fallen off so maybe don't stand under that bit. A chunky bench has also been provided within, centrally wooden but with concrete supports at each end, although one of the back supports has snapped off. The Dulwich Society secured funding for repairs to the shelter in both 2005 and 2015 and added the information board inside in 2018. I do hope you're enjoying my analysis of its contents.
South Croxted Road is a late Victorian creation, the original road hereabouts being the parallel Alleyn Road. The new connection couldn't be built until the old Dulwich Manor House had been demolished allowing a fresh link from Park Hall Road. That wood and plaster homestead wasn't actually a manor house, it gained that name in error in the 1860s, and its final owner was a certain Mr John Westwood who was the Secretary of various irrigation and canal companies in India. The Manor House estate was then bought by Edward Van Vliet, a builder from South Norwood, who added the final section of the new road in 1898. This wasn't tarmacked until WW1 so initially Camberwell Vestry had to water the road surface in the summer to keep the dust down. I could tell you where they kept the water carts, but I'll save that nugget for those who go along and read the board in person.
The first buses along South Croxted Road were unnumbered and horsedrawn circa 1900, as evidenced by black and white postcards from the period. It's likely that they were operated by the Thomas Tilling bus company who had a large stable behind the nearby Paxton Hotel, and services probably operated between Herne Hill and Crystal Palace. Tillings started using motor vehicles in 1904 but nobody knows when they first came this way. But we do know that by 1912 several operators were rumbling by, this because several residents had complained to the Dulwich Estate, and in August 1914 one chap even wrote a stroppy letter to The Times. "The suburb has recently been invaded by the motor-bus," he wrote, "and from morning till night the houses are shaken to their foundation." The bus shelter wasn't present at the time, remember, it came half a century later.
In early November 1908 the motorbus between Brixton and South Croydon was numbered 3 and this is still the route which serves South Croxted Road. In late November 1908 the route was extended north to Oxford Circus and in April 1909 it gained an extension to Purley on Sundays only. Following various wartime twiddles the 3's official route settled down to become Camden Town to Crystal Palace, with a shorter Brixton to Crystal Palace 3A variant operating between 1924 and 1934. The 3's northern end has since been sequentially cut back to Oxford Circus (1986), Regent Street (2015), Piccadilly Circus (2017), Whitehall (2019) and Victoria (2023), although the information board doesn't mention the latter because it's too recent. It does however mention various other changes which I haven't recorded here for reasons of conciseness and tedium.
When Southwark council sought to expand their local list of heritage treasures in 2023 more than 70 residents nominated the South Croxted Road Bus Shelter. One of them wrote "The lovely wooden bus shelter only exists as a local resident gave up their garden to support the wider schools and housing expansion in this area", which suggests they too had read the information board. Another said "There used to be two matching wooden shelters here and this one survives", which is intriguing because the other side of the road would have been in the borough of Lambeth so administratively separate from Camberwell. The borough boundary still splits the road and the 3 still passes by, should you ever find yourself waiting for it in this splendid old tram throwback. If only more bus shelters had an information board inside how much more entertaining our journeys might be. Or perhaps not, depending.
