Although most of the posts so far have been about bus service updates, I had planned originally to start travelling across Hampshire and Dorset again, and bring you a picture of some of the places that you could travel to by bus and train. With the pandemic continuing to loom, the plans changed. With this blog being an interest to me, rather than anything in the line of work, it has taken more of a side line than planned.
If you have been keeping an eye on the Twitter though, you will occasionally see me obligate the historians with a few old pictures or timetables. Most of my pictures of older buses are long consigned to the poor paper that the printer of the day used; but the timetables made it.
I have almost always lived in, or very close to Hampshire. I was brought up in and around Portsmouth when the seafront had open-top buses, South Parade Pier had not yet closed, and Joanna’s still had sticky floors.
Southsea’s Seafront Service
Over the last few years, the seafront itself has not really seen much of a bus service. Granted, the Health Education department at the council prefer people visiting the beach to either walk from Gunwharf Quays, or Palmerston Road.
The good thing about the next bit, is that Portsmouth City Council have continued to update their all-operator maps over the years and they even released one back in October – the Portsmouth transport page is here and you can download the full map directly here.
Before we continue, we should note that we are back into a lockdown. The X4 and Star 8 are not running between Gunwharf and Clarence Pier at the moment, and the 17 is not running at all. Of course, we are not specifically talking about the pandemic service at the moment.
Over the course of the summer, the beach can be full of holiday makers and locals. Many of them probably park in the car parks surrounding Southsea Common and paying a fortune for the privilege. It would be nice to make the service attractive to passengers and get them out of that queue that always forms to get into either Gunwharf or Clarence Pier car parks.
It used to be popular – or at least frequent
We are going to start by going back a long way. This is a timetable that entered my collection a while ago.
In 1972 they seem to have had a pretty good seafront bus service. To be fair, you would probably expect that most people would use the bus; car ownership was low and only about half of all households had regular access to a car.
Although the timetable does not specifically show that there were open-top buses along the seafront back then, sources including Old Bus Photos and Wikipedia citing Cornell, E. L.; Parke, John (1976). Britain’s Buses in the Seventies suggest that Leyland Titans were converted to open top at the time.
So back in 1972, the Portsmouth Joint Services service was in two sections. The first was from the Dockyard (what would now be Gunwharf bus station) to the Hayling Ferry and a second between Old Portsmouth Point and South Parade Pier.
We digress though, as I am on a meandering journey of the mind and it took me some time to find that photograph from my very small collection.
Back then of course, there were fewer cars on the road, so a high season vehicle requirement of 3 was probably more achievable than it would be today. In the 1970s the City of Portsmouth converted some existing buses into open top for continued services.
One of which is preserved and as far as I am aware still in store at the City of Portsmouth Preserved Transport Depot. This picture was taken when it was based in Old Portsmouth, although over the years they have relocated to Portchester.
Competition: 25 vs 70
The Leyland Titan PD4s were retired in 1972 and services reduced in the late 1970s and early 1980s when passenger numbers reduced and probably because car ownership did the opposite. City of Portsmouth Passenger Transport Department became a council arms length company at deregulation as Portsmouth City Bus, later being owned by Southampton City Bus and then Stagecoach. Sorry – too much history and less about open top buses.
Peoples Provincial had been running open top services in Gosport for many years, but in the late 1980s and early 1990s were running Service 70 along the summer Southsea seafront. It was a replacement largely for the 25, which is ironic as a new operator was soon to revive it in competition.
I thought that I had more timetables from the era. An undated single sheet leaflet shows Peoples Provincial running the service half hourly as the Sunrider 70 which to me puts it around the turn of the decade into the 1990s. At the time, the service run with two buses between Gunwharf and Hayling Ferry, but they also run from and to Fareham to start their day. it was at a time when Peoples Provincial also operated a Sunday service between Gosport and Fareham as the 33:
While Peoples Provincial was happily trundling up and down Southsea seafront, in 1990 the acquisition of Portsmouth City Bus by Stagecoach was deemed anti-competitive, running alongside it’s original Southdown operation. It was sold to rapidly growing Transit Holdings, a company that was formed in Devon and favourable at running as a minibus-intensive operation.
By the mid-1990s it was running it’s own service 25, albeit as a Hoverbus branded shuttle from Commercial Road South to The Hard (or Gunwharf as it is now) and then to the Hovertravel terminal. It soon began running, not as a branded Hovershuttle service, but with an open top bus on Sundays, and at other times Blue Admiral ran the open top service as The Admiral.
Certainly back in the Summer of 1994, The Admiral had become the 25, running between The Hard, Southsea Seafront and Eastney, although I fear only as far as Henderson Road rather than all the way to the Ferry.
Over the years though, the services continued. Peoples Provincial, and later Red and Blue Admiral were bought by FirstGroup. They were merged and services redistributed to make a common route network.
By the Summer of 1996, the merged First Provincial were running an open top service every 15 minutes between Commercial Road, The Hard, and then along the seafront. A cream livery, and red mid-line flash became more normal, although not for all the open-top fleet.
By 2002 the Peoples Provincial open top service, now First Hampshire, was over. Whether this was a corporate decision or simply a lack of use I would not know, although Eastleigh-based Xelabus did try to resurrect the service for a short time in 2012. They mainly used a Leyland Atlantean, although I seem to remember that a standard bus was used almost as much at time.
So Why Do I Reminisce over Open Top Buses?
Its a shame that there is no longer an open top bus service in Portsmouth. Right at the very beginning, the map shows that a service 25 does indeed still run, but for a different style of contracted service.
Where open top services still run in Bournemouth, Weymouth, London; it might be the bit of nostalgia that Portsmouth needs where many people will not want to risk venturing too far for a summer holiday.
It would be nice to see an open-top service across the Seafront this year. It would be surprising to me, if there is less demand in Portsmouth and Southsea than there is in Weymouth, for example. There is just as much along the seafront as there is on Weymouth Esplanade, and maybe it is something to kick start this season.
With the Optare Solo minibus service that plies it’s trade on the 25, maybe co-ordinating the 45 minute frequency with a seafront service might work? Even if it did not go all the way to Hayling Ferry – there is no connection the other side anyway – with the South Parade Pier in a better place than it has been, and the delightful boat lake….
Ah, those were the days!
I also recall the 333 Southdown summer only open top service from The Hayling Ferry running along Hayling Island seafront.