The phantom bus of North Kensington
How the streets of west London were temporarily haunted by an AEC Regent double-decker bus
It’s still summer 2024, and I’m taking a break from my usual subjects.
Instead, I want to take you back to 1930s London and the mysterious tale of how North Kensington was haunted by the number 7 bus.
In 1933, there was a reorganisation of transport in the capital which meant that the London General bus company disappeared from the streets, with their services being taken over by the new London Transport on 1 July. One of the routes inherited from the former company was the number 7. In its ‘General’ livery, here is a photo of that route outside North Kensington Library on Ladbroke Grove.
1933 was a bad year for the London General bus company. It was a bad year for Germany with Hitler taking over. It was a bad year for the world with the continuing economic fallout from the Wall Street crash. To lighten things up, it was however a good year for coin collectors as the Royal Mint only issued seven 1933 pennies creating, until 1971 and decimalisation, the constant urge to look through your small change.
The next year, at 1:15 in the morning on 11 June 1934, on the corner between St. Mark's Road and Cambridge Gardens, London W10, a motorist was killed when he crashed into the wall of a house.
There was an inquest and a witness declared that he had a seen a number 7 bus heading directly at the car shortly before it left the road.
The coroner declared himself sceptical about the bus, given the late hour of the incident and the fact that it bore, according to the witness, the wrong livery for 1934. This was all reported in the London newspapers. In those far-off pre-internet days, human nature was still the same. During the following days and weeks, newspapers were plied with a number of letters from folk who claimed to have seen the same bus. Or at least, people who knew somebody who had seen the bus.
The description of the bus was very specific. On its side, it had the number 7 and the word ‘General’. The bus was fully lit with no passengers and no driver onboard. It appeared at exactly 1.15 a.m. and disappeared around the corner. Sometimes the bus engine could be heard running loudly. Sometimes it was silent.
Sightings of the phantom bus increased. Along the length of St Mark’s Road, drivers started to report incidents where the ghostly number 7 London General bus appeared on the road in those early morning hours and charged towards their car, forcing drivers to swerve to avoid collision.
A local transport inspector told a variant and that he had seen the bus park in a bay at the bus station and, with the engine running, disappear after a few seconds.
Rumours spread. The bus always appeared at 1.15 a.m. and it was not always moving. At times, it would just linger on the side of the road and disappear when drunken pedestrians assumed it was a proper bus that could take them home safely. It was claimed that whoever boarded it would be “lost forever.”
In response to the original fatal accident, in 1935 the Royal Borough of Kensington widened the corner and improved visibility by adding more streetlamps. From that moment on, the phantom bus did not make a reappearance.
So perhaps, it was the ghost world intervening to get the authorities to improve a dangerous North Kensington corner. Who knows?