Walking the streets of London in 1933

History books come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, and some were never intended to be  record of the past.

But the passage of 90 years has turned my copy of Bacon’s Map of London and Suburbs, into just that.

Now I say mine, but strictly speaking it was Dad’s and although there is no printer’s date I think it must have been produced in 1933, because while there are a few dates spread across book, there are none after 1933.

As well as the map, there the “Stranger’s Guide to London", which along with all the main tourist attractions includes a section of London’s markets and how the city was governed and run.

And that of course opens up a heap of historical details which back in 1933 were just how it was done.

So, “Electric Lighting is carried out roughly, half by private companies and half by Borough Council undertakings”, there were five Gas companies and eight Metropolitan water companies, and “as from July 1933the London Passenger Transport Board assumed control; of nearly all the passenger transport undertakings within in a radius of 30 miles from Charing Cross”.

Added to which during the previous year these “transport undertakings  carried the following number of passengers; railways 430,000,000, omnibuses 1, 960, 000,000, tramways 1,030, 000,000, trolleybuses, 27,000,000, coaches, 16,000,000”.

I know that Tussaud’s Exhibition had only just reopened after being burnt down in a fire in 1929, and that admission to the Armouries, Jewel House and the Bloody Tower at the Tower of London cost 6d., but were free on Saturdays, which was still the case just sixteen years later when I started going at the tender age of 10.

Sadly, for those of us who grew up in Eltham, the big coloured fold out map stops at Lee Green, but covers the east of south east London, including Peckham and New Cross when we lived when I was still very young.

Still the map and guidebook are in remarkable good condition, although at some point dad repaired the edges of the map with Scotch tape, and it has detached itself from the book.

Other than that, it is still a joy to read and a little bit of home, which a full thirty years ago came north to Manchester.

Location; London, 1933

Pictures; cover and pages from Bacon’s Map of London and Suburbs, 1933, from the collection of Andrew Simpson