Moving Wartime London: Public Transport in the First World War

Abstract

During the Great War public transport in London was put under extreme pressure. Services suffered from staff and material shortages, fuel rationing, and requisitioning. Despite this, over 300 million more passengers travelled in 1918 than in 1913. The Metropolitan Police was forced to relax rules governing passenger safety on trams and buses, ‘straphanging’ became endemic, and trains were crowded ‘almost to danger point’. This article examines how the impact of the First World War on London's public transport represented both an ‘interlude’ and a permanent discontinuity. While the female transport worker was the personification of wartime exceptionalism, the rise of the female commuter and the entrenching of the ‘rush hour’ as part of the commute remain even today as a more permanent legacy of the Great War.