2024 marks 200 years since the start of the first ever local bus service. Paul Williams from the Museum of Transport, Greater Manchester explains why that’s still important to today’s industry
One gloomy morning, early in 1824, 35-year old Yorkshire-born John Greenwood looked out of the bay window of his tollkeeper’s cottage and had an idea for a new business venture. He was something of a businessman, as at that time certain toll roads were leased to keepers who paid for the lease and kept the revenue from tolls. He’d taken on a lease in East Lancashire, but by the early 1820s he’d taken on a busier lease in Salford, at the junction of the roads from Manchester to Bolton and to Eccles.
At that time Salford was regarded as a fairly prosperous area, with comfortable middle class home owners who would ride, or walk, from their Pendleton homes to offices and shops in Manchester. As John looked on from his tollbar, he spied the genesis of something we regard as familiar and humdrum – commuting.
Now, from Pendleton to Manchester is nearly three miles and that’s an hour’s walk – not pleasant in the cold and rain. So John, thinking about the long-distance stagecoaches passing by each day (which had already been in use in some recognisable form for centuries), had an idea: a coach that would run regularly and frequently, on a fixed route, stopping anywhere along the way and at a fare of sixpence. Sixpence wasn’t within reach of the labourers and artisans of Salford, but it was a boon for people who could afford it. John Greenwood had just created Britain’s first bus service, five years before George Shillibeer did the same thing in London and demonstrating the dictum that what Manchester thinks today, the world thinks tomorrow.
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