Buses and trolleybus maps 1949–50.

I have a collection of London Transport maps dating back to when I was a young child. I used to spend hours looking at bus maps and mother said more than once that I could read bus maps before I could read a book.

The London Underground map gave me a view of the world I have never lost, as have London bus maps, because they all distort London and Middlesex as it then was (and still do).

Travelling on buses have been a passion of mine since I was first put on an 83 outside the Regal Cinema on Ealing Road and met by my Auntie Wean at the Kingsbury Church bus-stop at the top of Townsend lane, where she and my Uncle Smiler lived in a prefab with my cousins Derek and Fiona.

By the time I started school at the age of five I was doing the journey on my own. For now, I thought some My Wembley visitors might be interested  in just how far you could go on a bus from Wembley in the late-1949 and 1950. I have included part of a 2010 bus map to show how routes and roads served changed in sixty years.

Use the Key boxes to understand the way routes are shown at their destinations. This will enable you to work out what day(s) individual bus and trolleybus routes operated. The 2010 bus map does not show such detail.

Just click on a map to enlarge: