Our successfull ‘Changing Sudbury’ exhibition has been extended until Monday 21st October 2019… Make sure you don’t miss it! Find more details here, and enjoy below one of the many memories that local residents have enthusiastically shared with us:
We would have to go to the end of our road for a start, and then we would have to carefully cross the road to get to the bus stop and the bus stop was opposite where there is a pub called… there was a pub called ‘The Mitre’ and the bus stop was a request stop, so you would have to put your hand out if you wanted the bus to stop. There were 2 bus stops actually, there was one a few yards further up which I just about remember, which was a Green Line bus which ran between Kent and Buckinghamshire until about the 1960s. But anyway, going back to the red bus, we people waited for people to get off the open back of the Route master bus and then you’d get on and go upstairs or downstairs and very often you’d have a jovial bus conductor who would have his own or her own style of doing things. One thing I do remember was one old character going around upstairs on the bus collecting the fares and saying, ‘Money for the poor, money for the poor’! Then when he wanted to attract the driver’s attention to carry on from the stop, there was nothing to, no bell, so he would just get a coin and rap it on the front of the front deck of the bus, so the driver could hear this coin. And so never a dull moment really! Francis
A ‘one-person’ operated single deck bus on route 92 passes Butler’s Green, Sudbury, in 1973 (© Francis Waddington)
‘Changing Sudbury’ is a community heritage project aiming to record the social and cultural history of Sudbury Town, Wembley, since the 1950s through to the present day, using a mixture of oral history interviews, an exhibition, booklet, website and a short film. The project will interview older adults and record their memories of the area, collect and display an archive of related material, and disseminate learning experiences for local school aged children and young adults on how their community has developed in the last 60 years. ‘Changing Sudbury’ is a 1-year project, delivered by Sudbury Neighbourhood Centre and supported by The National Lottery Heritage Fund.
