This picture is from 25th June 1983, and shows the very last Routemaster bus to make a scheduled journey over a level crossing anywhere in London, which was the one by our own dear Mortlake Station.  (Other buses have gone across – and more importantly waited at – level crossings since for various reasons.  But this was the last one to do it on a regular, scheduled route.)

It is a number 33 making its journey to Avondale Road bus garage in Mortlake.  The garage closed that day, and was knocked down later that year.  It had been acquired by the London General Omnibus Company in 1900, in the days when the building needed stabling for the horses who pulled the omnibi.  The garage is fondly remembered by the bus staff, who had their recreation rooms – with a snooker table – upstairs, and by those locals who would sneak in to use the canteen downstairs.  The main part of the building was, of course, used for the maintenance, upkeep and repair of buses.  There is still a turning circle where buses stop and drivers rest, but the main part of the garage is now where Dovecote Gardens has been built.

Now that I am grown up, Putney seems very near indeed, but as a child I would catch the 33 or the 37 bus with my 2 pence in my hot little hand and ask the conductor for a child’s fare to that far-off metropolis.

Looking at the picture brings another memory from those days which seems even more unlikely now is that there was a little gate on the right of the level crossing as you look at the photo which an impatient pedestrian could open and cross the tracks.  People in these Health and Safety-conscious days can’t believe it.  As you stood on the pavement waiting for yet another train to pass, looking up and down the tracks and tutting with your fellow-pedestrians (not deigning to use the stairs over the bridge, of course), the temptation to open a little gate and scurry (or stroll) across must have been overwhelming. Yet more evidence that things were Very Different in the Olden Days.  Or that the Olden Days are more recent than you think.

Contributed by Our Man in Mortlake