A couple of days ago, while I was walking between listed buildings in Grange Hill and Collier Row, I spotted a old bus stop.
This is Lambourne Road, a road that no longer has any buses, so that immediately made me stop and look. But what really piqued my interest was the flag onthe bus stop because that still had the symbol for the National Bus Company on it, and they disappeared about forty years ago.
Alongside was the name of the local bus company at the time, Eastern National, and they disappeared ages ago too. How on earth had this survived?
Looking closer another word had been stuck on top in red letters, worn down by the elements, and that said BORDABUS. I'd never heard of them, so how long had all this obsolete signage been lurking here?
And then I carried on with my life.
» As can you, unless you have a particular interest in this topic.
Here's where the bus stop is on a map. It's the blue cross.
» This is the last printed bus map from March 2016, which I've had to update because the route of the 462 was changed three months later.
» The orange tyre tracks mark the boundary of Greater London.
» I've also marked "the point in London furthest from a listed building" from yesterday's post. It's the pink dot.
No buses go along Lambourne Road because very few people live there, whereas thousands of people live on the Hainault estate just to the south so all the buses go there. The Essex village of Collier Row is very fortunate to have a regular bus service on route 150, but it enters past the country park and stops 200m beyond the Greater London boundary, entirely skipping Lambourne Road. So when did Lambourne Road last see a bus?
I started by checking the longevity of the National Bus Company. It was founded in 1969, absorbing London Transport's country area in 1970 and introducing the red and blue logo in 1972. Then in 1988 the Thatcher government dissolved it, selling off all bus services to private operators between 1986 and 1988. EasternNational was part of a management buyout in 1987, becoming FirstBus in 1995. We can thus date this Lambourne Road bus stop to somewhere between July 1972 and February 1987, so it's been here for at least 40 years.
» If it were 200m up the road it'd be in London and TfL would have removed it, but it's in Essex and nobody has.
» If National Bus Company branding interests you, this look at its corporate design will be of interest.
Researching BORDABUS is easy because it's a really unusual word, but also hard because not much comes up. This did, though, which again points to the 1980s.
I also found some bustimetables, because the internet is surprisingly excellent. This one's from April 1984.
It's an odd route because "Passengers are carried to or from Romford only". Also it only ran three days a week, suggesting it was a service for market day shoppers. It stopped at our bus stop at 1013, 1213 and 1513, if you were lucky.
I also found photographs of this bus, or should I say coach, because Men Who Like Buses were also taking photos of Bordabus vehicles in the 1980s. Here's a double decker number 8 in Romford in July 1990, here's a number 6 coach in Hainault in November 1981 (it even says Via Collier Row on the front) and here's a a Bordabus and a Bordacoach at Abridge in 1981. I know the number 6 Bordabus also stopped at our bus stop because I found this bus map dated 1986.
The road's green because the B6 was a very infrequent service at this time, according to the timetable just three trips a day between Abridge and Brentwood, schooldays only.
Jumping ahead to a 1996 bus map there were now three services along Lambourne Road, the 8†, the 206† and the 511†.
• The 8 was Bordacoach route 8, a Wednesdays only service between Cheshunt and Romford (1997 timetable here). A Thursday-only route 9 ran in the summer months between Cheshunt and Southend, apparently, but that's not recorded on the map.
• The 206 was a similarly infrequent route between Loughton and Chigwell Row, including a twiddle round the Limes Farm Estate. It's all that remained of a former London Transport service running every 20 minutes between Walthamstow and Chigwell (timetable here).
• And the 511 was a market day service from Romford operated by London Transport (details here), but because it looped anti-clockwise it never stopped at our surviving bus stop so we can ignore that.
However by the 1999 bus map all three services had vanished and Lambourne Road was busless again. And it's been busless ever since.
» Technically Epping Forest Community Transport ran a minibus twice a week from Chigwell Row to Epping on behalf of Chigwell Parish Council as recently as March 2020, but you had to be a Chigwell resident to use it so it, also it was Hail and Ride so never used our bus stop so it doesn't count.
In conclusion, this bus stop on Lambourne Road was last served by a scheduled bus route somewhere between 1997 and 1999, almost 30 years ago, and yet it's still here displaying the logo of a company which last operated in 1987, almost 40 years ago. Would never happen in London.
