I will happily admit that this post may only be of interest to my Teddington Readers, (Hi Gary !!) but this is just such an interesting video.
It follows the route of the Trolleybus between Twickenham and Teddington on it’s first day of operation in May 1931. Trolleybuses, electric powered buses as you find in many European Cities today were once popular in London, but with great foresight were replaced with diesel powered buses only 20 years later! This trolleybus route is now the 281 bus for example.
What I found really fascinating is just how much of the familiar landscape I see every day has changed in 80 years, in some cases it’s really hard to find a building that you recognise today, especially the turning point in Teddington only a few hundred metres from where I live but almost impossible to recognise.
We are lucky to have rare video like this for it’s completeness but at the same time it’s disappointing that for future generations Google Street View which could offer a similar resouce has had to be mutilated to accomodate privacy concerns.
Written and submitted from home (51.425N, 0.331W)
7 replies on “1930’s Teddington Street View”
It was most definitely of interest to one of your Teddington readers (Hi Ed!!) with the added bonus of playing “I can see my road”. So much has changed and yet so much is immediately recognizable. Thanks Ed.
Pah! You need to look more closely!
At the Twickenham end the bank is still identical – and a bank – although the old cinema (?) at the corner of Cross Deep and Heath Road has gone. The Three Kings in Heath Road is still there, albeit closed, and the Red Lion is also still there, albeit a Tesco Metro these days. I see a pattern of austerity and sobriety here… Even the gates to the Stanley Road bus garage are still the same.
Also, the Mayor at the end is still in office, I think.
Great, Edinburgh dreams of a modern tram system like that 😉 Oh well, perhaps in 5 years they will finish or run out of money…..
[…] a closing note which will probably be only of interest to my Teddington readers (Hi Ed !!), a branch of Crossrail was also planned to start at Kingston and link with the main Crossrail […]
Hi
Thank you for uploading this video: definitely a trip down memory Lane for me as I travelled half of the route every day between 1948 and 1954 on my way to School at Hampton – initially by trolleybus, route 667, and then by bike.
The cinema referred to by Martin was the Luxor when I first knew it. Alsford’s timber yard had moved to the south side of Heath Road by the time I used the route regularly; I have a vague memory that their premises shown in the video suffered bomb damage in WW2.
Don’t know if you have seen this but this is an update of this 1931 film done in split screen with the 2012 version. Link http://youtu.be/ERyR0OWd22k
or search Twickenham to Teddington 2012
I remember travelling on the trolley bus from Teddington to Twickenham in the late 1940s with my grandmother who lived in Munster Road Teddington and going to school at the top of our road. What always stands out was the smell from the electronics from trolley buses which I thought was great at the time.