A County Town Bus Station

I heave a sigh of relief, believing that I don’t have to go online to consult a timetable, but can squeeze in a few minutes at the bus station, before I meet my brother to do so. That I have time to plan future trips and times.

All that remains in this dust-trap is a dirty, scratched screen on ‘stilts’. A black outline against dazzling sunlight, virtually illegible for someone with reasonable eyesight. It tells me that the bus is due in 5 minutes. There are NO timetables in this bus station! Even the most ardent practitioner of mindfulness would find this inconvenient.

In the sixties this bus station meant travel, windows with metal crank handles, fragrant, beige tickets with purple ink, produced by the wind and click of metallic, grey metal machines. Designed by George Gibson, they were first issued for use on London Transport in 1953. Printed paper tickets were spat out like an upturned tongue, at the turn of a handle and ripped off by a conductor. The machine’s sound and the conductor’s chat were the bus’s symphony. It was used for the last time in England on 14 February 2022 on the route from Epping to the Epping-Ongar Railway.

This bus station hosted a criss-cross of routes with buses in transit. It was a hub of activity, different buses and coaches, different designs, single storeys,

double-deckers, red and green; coaches came and went. Ticket inspectors patrolled and chose their routes armed with a clipboard. Their peaked caps gave them away.

Familiar interiors, sounds, fittings and arrangements: round individual, pearlized light bulbs against a yellow interior, each bulb housed in round holes, surrounded by a small ridge. On the floor, at the front of the bus, a heater that looked like an armadillo-shell and had an oval which the toe of a child’s shoe would fit in.

Above all the heads were rectangular adverts and information – including ‘Keep Britain Tidy’ – a red, fibre cord ran, front to back on each side, threaded through metal fittings which were screwed to the ceiling. The cord was only to be tugged before the required bus stop with a ‘ting’ or ‘ting ting’ by the conductor on departure or in emergencies.

Some single-deck buses had a mesh luggage rack; you had to be careful not to bang your head on its brackets when standing to leave. The conductor made sure everyone was on and seated, or left safely, they made sure that not too many people got on.

On a double-decker, smokers sat upstairs. A stepped grid with numbers on was displayed above or inside the luggage rack on the open platform at the rear of

the bus. It held the fares to and from each point along the journey. Many double decker platforms had parallel wooden slats; others had a rubberised carpet with raised squares. The metal pole on the open platform was wrapped in a wind of plastic woven tape which was cream and black.

This particular bus station had an adjacent, unsurfaced car park, surrounded by a fence, always well-used. The town so many visited had an indoor market, arcade and an outdoor market on Saturdays as well as many other independent shops and small supermarkets. This county town had a Co-op and Woolworths, Boots and many pubs, a library too. It even had a joke shop which sold fireworks before 5 November. It has a castle, and the once stony car park by the motte was transformed into a Civic Hall, then cinema. It is now closed as a multi-screen cinema takes shape.

Today we see, closures, small, random pop-up shops catering for the super-wealthy, not families and charity shops whose wares decline in times of recession.

In my lifetime, this bus station has evolved from a place with smells of tree blossom, food, bus stops with printed timetables for each route, with every possible destination. I’d yet to learn to read a timetable, just seeing them was an incentive to learn. There were bus numbers and destinations I could wonder at. Places I didn’t visit but wanted to; ones I imagined I might, when

older, or ‘bigger’ as adults say but, being tall for my age, this concept didn’t work for me.

Our village had a shop and a post office, the county town so much more. I don’t know why, but butchers’ shops held me captive with their sawdust on the floor, the only shops that did. The pinkish light, and hack through bones and flesh with huge, rectangular blades by ‘blushing’ butchers. The blades with a small hole in one corner, I never understood why at the time; the squeak of long undulating knives through dead animals. Pale, eviscerated bodies hanging on hooks, no head or hooves, unlike the farm creatures I’d see wandering and grazing in the fields at the bottom of our garden. Outside, lifeless, feathered birds, heads hanging, unlike the pheasants we’d hear around the Old Church on our Sunday afternoon family walks. I’d toy with the sawdust on the wood and savour its softness even though I knew it was there to soak up accidental blood spills.

The bus station aroused my anticipation of longer journeys, shopping, swings, the castle paths along flint walls, concealed by plants and trees, stone steps, ducks and dips – organised nature. Then the return home to isolation constant traffic and smallness.

There was a public bath, no longer in use, prices still on display and a huge stone, above the entrance displayed the engraved words ‘Public Baths’. Public

conveniences were just that, convenient, with the fishy smell from the Gents and mouldy-mop, burning smell of the Ladies. Cramped, concrete cubicles which barely held mother and toddler, worrying streaks of unflushed blood, “Oh look Mummy, someone’s been bleeding!”

“Shhhh!”

Paper towels and sharp, translucent prickly toilet paper that hurt, with perforations like intermittent zig-zag teeth. Paper rolls, smooth on one side, rough on the other, not famed for absorbency.

Above each hand basin a lumpy-glass, round soap dispenser which glistened in the dim lighting. It felt like an orange and rotated on a metal bracket which I could barely reach. It delivered a blob of liquid soap from a top which looked like the metal top of a salt cellar.

Time brought the relocation and demolition of the local paper’s noisy printing press which hammered away, doors open in summer; the demolition of the corner building with the huge Swan Vestas hoarding, dated even in the late 60s. The closure and destruction of the arcade with its clothes shops, cobbler, ornament shops, record shop, haberdashery, lamps, stylophones and lava lamps. For years, the cobbler had displayed an early sixties advert of a young, dark-haired woman, in a turtle-neck sweater showing off the re-soled base of her stiletto shoe, defaced in indelible ink with a word I didn’t understand, “dildo”. The vast expanse of fenced car park vanished too.

The seventies brought a modern, compact shopping centre with public toilets, cafes, Boots, numerous hairdressers, opticians and a Waitrose all the new heartbeat of quality and affluence, reviving in the county town after earlier destruction.

You wouldn’t think that public toilets could vanish because they had been sold off to private land owners and then re-developed. That they would become a luxury, even when filthy, because they are too expensive to maintain. Who could have imagined that residents would have to witness the slow death of a meeting place and travel hub to be re-developed for hotels, then affordable properties, then private rentals – all before the accommodation has been built?

What lies behind this transformation from ‘county town’ to dormitory for those who will, most likely have to work from home anyway?

Passengers old and young no longer ‘enjoy’ the relative comfort of an over-crowded, unheated waiting room, minus café, much less sit on a bench without the threat of piles.

Who would have thought that the riverbank, removed from the beady eye of CCTV would render anyone going there to see or feed the ducks, worthy of the suspicions of community officers; that an innocent moment of escape would become an interrogation, “Are you ok?” “Where are you going?”

People needing toilets when they are out are not ‘pass the parcels’ they do not deserve the forfeit of having to go to the next place or shop, legs crossed, for a pee.

Not even a radar key will get you into accessible toilets in many venues – some chains use them as temporary store rooms for comestibles and drinks. Some make the pre-condition that you have to be a customer to utilise their toilet. In this town the station’s accessible toilet is double-locked. An argument with 2 members of staff is not enough to be able to relax your bladder or the bladder of the person you are caring for before you buy a ticket.

How many more county towns boast a bus station and toilet facilities like these.