Jeremy Buck wrote (message 7610) :
The Grey-Green Coaches offices and garage were at Stamford Hill not Wood Green. The company ran services to the east coast...rather than east London !
Jeremy is of course right. My brain and memory have become addled with age and I've confused two completely separate things. The Grey Green garage was on the High Road in Stamford Hill, while the bus from Wood Green to Southend via Romford (the 251) was operated by Eastern National, who did have a bus station in Wood Green.
I did a search for details of the 251 and
found an article
tracing its history right back to 1927 and as far forward as 2000, when it ceased to run.
In its heyday there were four buses an hour from Wood Green to towns in Essex. I'm curious as to why - this doesn't seem an obvious connection to me.
As for Grey Green, if I'm not mistaken (again), they only got involved in bus services (as opposed to operating coaches) when the Thatcher government, who had taken over London bus and tube services after abolition of the Greater London Council, began inviting other companies to tender to run London bus routes. Grey Green were one of the first to take advantage of this. Notably, they took over the 24, a major route which runs along Whitehall. In north London their routes included the 125 (Winchmore Hill to Finchley) and the 210 (Finsbury Park to Golders Green), the latter using a unique type of bus with a single-deck body on a chassis designed for double deckers.
The reason why this has come up in relation to bus driver strikes affecting the 121, 329, W6 and many more routes is that Arriva's history can be traced back to Grey Green. The Thatcher government had split London Buses into a number of separate companies. One of them was Leaside Buses, with garages in Palmers Green, Wood Green and Tottenham. The company that owned Grey Green, Cowie, purchased Leaside Buses in the 1990s, and went on to buy more bus operators, eventually becoming the countrywide (and international) bus and train operator Arriva.
As I mentioned last week, Arriva was bought by German rail operator Deutsche Bahn, who a couple of years ago sold it to a US-based private equity company. Such companies do not enjoy a good reputation as regards safeguarding the interests of employees (in this case, drivers) or customers (passengers) and tend to concentrate on squeezing assets to make a quick buck before jettisoning a purchase and moving on. Hopefully, this isn't the case with
Squared Capital
, the owners of Arriva.
The first few of the planned strike days appears to have brought the company's management to the negotiating table, and some strikes have been cancelled, though they will resume should the talks fail.
